Tara
Hankinsonknock for beer

Running a brewery that was designed not to feel like one

Tara Hankinson runs the brand, the marketing, and the taprooms at TALEA Beer Co., which means she spends her days on a question most breweries never bother to ask: what would beer look like if it were built for the people craft beer spent forty years ignoring. The answer, at TALEA, is fruit-forward beers with names like Sun Up and Raspberry Crush Gose, packaging you would not be embarrassed to bring to a dinner party, and taprooms - five of them now, from Williamsburg to Bryant Park to the Penn District - that were each designed by a female architect. That last detail is not decoration. It is the thesis.

TALEA is, by the count that matters to the people who track these things, New York City's first woman-owned production brewery. It sells beer in more than 1,300 stores across the state, including the Whole Foods and Trader Joe's shelves where a lot of people buy their first craft beer without meaning to. Hankinson is co-CEO alongside LeAnn Darland, a structure that sounds like a governance problem waiting to happen and has instead been the whole point since the beginning: two people, two jobs, one shared irritation with an industry that kept selling to the same room.

The irritation is worth quoting directly, because Hankinson does not soften it. "A lot of craft beer has been made by craft beer lovers for craft beer lovers, selling to the same echo chamber," she has said. Her fix is not to make the beer worse or the marketing louder. It is to make the whole experience feel like somewhere you would actually want to spend an afternoon: "as creative as the best restaurants in New York City, as friendly as the staff at a kid's store and as beautiful of a space as the coolest coffee shops."

The division of labor with Darland is clean enough that it explains a lot about how TALEA works. Darland, a U.S. Navy veteran who found craft beer in San Diego, handles the brewing and operations side. Hankinson takes the brand, the marketing, and the taprooms - which is to say she owns the part of the business a customer actually touches. Two co-CEOs is the kind of arrangement that gets founders lectured about accountability, and TALEA has simply run it as a feature: the company that describes itself as woman-owned and, by some accounts, veteran-owned is run by two people who split the job down a seam that maps to their actual expertise rather than their titles.

You can see the strategy most clearly in the rooms. The Williamsburg flagship came first, in a former warehouse; every taproom after it was designed by a female architect, with the deliberate goal of building spaces that read as inclusive rather than clubby. There are, in TALEA's telling, thoughtful touches you would not find at a typical brewery. The point is not that beer needs to be gentler. It is that the room around the beer is a product decision, and most breweries had been making it badly for decades.

The fundraising story is the one Hankinson tells most, and it is genuinely instructive about what conviction costs. TALEA pitched roughly 400 venture capitalists. Most passed. A recurring piece of feedback was that the founders should make a "pink beer" - a product literally colored and marketed for women. They declined, on the grounds that the entire premise was wrong: the goal was not to segregate women into a novelty aisle but to make beer that anyone might want and that happened to be made by women. Eventually they raised over $2 million, most of it from around 116 investors - friends, family, angels, people writing checks with a $25,000 minimum. Later they closed a Series A.

Before any of the taprooms existed, TALEA's beer was brewed under contract at Torch & Crown in the Bronx. The flagship Sun Up IPA launched in April 2019, before the company had a building of its own. In the earliest days the founders sold beer off a loading dock behind a handwritten sign that said, more or less, knock for beer. One Saturday of knocking brought in about a thousand dollars. The flagship brewery and taproom finally opened in Williamsburg in March 2021 - not, it should be noted, an easy month to open anything in New York.