craft-beer
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Dan Kenary Bet the Brewery on the People Who Built It
Harpoon began as three friends chasing the local beer culture they had found in Europe. Nearly four decades later, Kenary's most revealing product is not an IPA but a durable idea: let the people doing the work own the future.
Chris Sapyta Saw a Freight Train. Then He Rewired the Keg Business.
A railroad crossing gave Chris Sapyta the boxcar analogy that shaped keg pooling. Three decades later, the Keg Logistics founder is still solving the same stubborn problem: how to keep reusable steel moving without making brewers own every vessel.
John Dantzler Took a Teenage Beer Mishap All the Way to Manhattan
A confiscated fake ID, an exploding homebrew kit and 250 rejected spaces became a brewery beneath SoHo. Now its finance-minded co-founder is testing what independent craft can build together.
Damian Fagan Kept Redesigning the Brewery
A graphic designer’s homebrew labels became Almanac’s first calling card. Fifteen years later, Damian Fagan is still changing the brief - from farm-to-barrel beer to sandboxes, slushies, and neighborhood gathering places.
Charles Denby Put the Brewery’s Smallest Worker in Charge
A yeast geneticist followed a homebrewing annoyance into a new kind of ingredients company. His real breakthrough was learning that a clever organism still has to answer to the brewer holding the glass.
Tara Hankinson
Tara Hankinson is the co-founder and co-CEO of TALEA Beer Co., New York City's first woman-owned production brewery. After leaving jobs at PwC, The New York Times and a beer e-commerce startup, she and co-founder LeAnn Darland launched TALEA in 2019 to make craft beer approachable for the people it had long ignored. She runs the brand, marketing and a growing chain of design-forward taprooms across Manhattan and Brooklyn, with beer stocked in more than 1,300 retailers.
Ronn Friedlander
Ronn Friedlander is the co-founder and Co-CEO of Aeronaut Brewing Company in Somerville, Massachusetts. A New Jersey native who came to Boston in 2009 for a PhD in the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology program, he traded a career in medical engineering and biomaterials research for a brewery built on microbiology. He cultivates wild and custom yeast strains in an in-house lab, scaling them in a bioreactor from pilot pours to 500-gallon batches, and helped grow Aeronaut from a living-room homebrew operation into a regional craft beer brand with a second 'Cannery' facility in Everett and a 2023 strategic merger with Dorchester Brewing under the Tasty Liquid Alliance.
Youngwon Lee
Youngwon Lee is the founder and CEO of Dokkaebier, an Oakland-based craft brewery built around Asian ingredients and Korean folklore. After more than a decade in the wine and spirits trade across Seoul and California, he launched Dokkaebier in February 2020, named for the mischievous shape-shifting spirits of Korean myth. He brews beers like a kimchi sour and a yuzu blonde, and set out to change an industry where only about 2% of professionals identify as Asian American. In three years he released 40-plus beers, reached 400-plus retailers, and in 2023 acquired Oakland's Federation Brewing to take over its taproom near Jack London Square.
Mark Hellendrung
Mark Hellendrung is the Rhode Island native who bought a fading 1890 beer brand for less than $100,000 and made it New England's again. As owner and CEO of Narragansett Brewing Company, he resurrected a lager that had nearly vanished, brought brewing back to Rhode Island after a 30-plus-year exile, and opened a waterfront brewery and beer hall on the Providence harborfront. Before beer, he ran Nantucket Nectars and coached the team at Magic Hat. His pitch has always been the same: stay homegrown, stay local, and don't sell out to the big guys.