When Leann Darland and Tara Hankinson first met working together at beer e-commerce startup Hopsy, they both saw a huge gap in the craft beer industry. No brands were talking to women and brewery experiences weren’t yet as elevated as winery experiences. What started as the two of them delivering beer all over the city in a rented van turned into Talea, Williamsburg’s hippest new craft brewery. I spoke to Darland and Hankinson about their biggest challenges to date and what’s next for the duo.
Leann Darland and Tara Hankinson
Amy Shoenthal: You both left your corporate jobs to start this brewery - that’s literally the dream. Can you tell me about that journey?
Leann Darland: I went to undergrad at the naval academy in Annapolis MD, so the start of my professional career was as a Navy intelligence officer. I was stationed in San Diego around 2013, which was during the craft beer boom on the West Coast.
We had a tap room right around the corner from our apartment, which is what first planted a seed in my mind. I had a master’s degree in finance and always wanted to explore entrepreneurship. After the navy, I got a job at Google so I moved up to San Francisco. That’s where I started home brewing. I was also getting my MBA at Berkeley at the time.
As sexy as a brewery sounds, I knew margins weren’t great. It was a very crowded space, so I wanted to do due diligence before making a leap. I emailed so many breweries asking if I could work for free, but nobody replied. I eventually joined an ecommerce beer company called Hopsy as their head of finance. We ended up moving our headquarters from Berkeley, California to New York City. My husband left his dream job at Tesla to move here. That alone was quite a sacrifice for a job where I was making less than half of what I had been at Google. I always say, after getting our MBAs, our pay has gone down and down and down and down, eventually to zero and now to $2 Million in debt.
I opened a job for the head of customer experience, someone who could source beer from dozens of breweries across the country. When Tara’s application came across my desk for that role, I was like, wow, here’s another woman who has an MBA, is a home brewer with a successful career who is willing to take a chance on this beer startup. I had to figure out how to convince her to join the team.
Tara Hankinson: We were both attracted to that company because it was one foot in the corporate world but it was still beer. The summer after I graduated from business school I had a consulting job lined up but then decided to take a summer job at Wolffer Estate. Wolffer is like the California wineries – it’s a beautiful experience with a beautiful space, flights of wine, knowledgeable servers, a strong relationship with their customers, a wine club, and so much loyalty to the point where people make it a pilgrimage on a yearly basis. There was nothing like that in the beer space. Sure there are breweries and brewery tours where you get a free drink but it’s not the same. That’s when I realized there might be an opportunity.
Having these conversations are a nice opportunity to remind us what our original motivation was. Sometimes we’re so caught up in the operations and tactical side of things, we have to remind ourselves about the seeds of our original concept. It won’t always be exactly what we planned, but a lot of our original hypotheses panned out.
Shoenthal: What were those hypotheses?
Hankinson: We had a hunch that women were the fastest growing segment in craft beer, but brands weren’t really speaking to them. Historically craft beer drinkers were 70% men. Our hypothesis was that we would be authentically able to speak to a woman and a non craft beer consumer. We didn’t grow up in craft beer, so we know what it’s like to walk into a brewery and feel excluded when you don’t know the lingo and you don’t look like the other people there.
Darland: When you walk into a grocery store, you see rosés and hard seltzers screaming at the female consumer. There are very few beer brands trying to reach that audience.
When we lived in San Francisco, my girlfriends or my mom would visit and we’d go to Napa. We would overpay for a flight of wine and sign up drunk for the membership, but if I said let’s go brewery hopping, nobody wanted to do that. Nobody wants to get dressed up or make a day of it. Less than 3% of breweries in the US are owned exclusively by women so it makes total sense that none of them are speaking to the female consumer, or just the non beer-bro consumer. We wanted to create that experience.
Hankinson: The typical path for someone to open a brewery is to get an entry level job, work their way up, get a small group of investors, get a small space, outgrow it, get a bigger space. It’s the same person over and over. They grow up in the same echo chamber of what breweries have always been culturally. That’s not to say they’re not good; there are so many craft breweries who paved the way for us and helped us push the creative bounds. But things like hazy IPAs aren’t groundbreaking anymore. We make really great ones but we also get a lot of inspiration outside of the beer world. For example, we’re doing a collaboration with Levain Bakery on a stout in early January. That’s way more exciting to us than partnering with another brewery. Brewery collaborations are great but we find more satisfaction from making something different. We love the challenge of making a beer that’s inspired by their double chocolate chocolate chip cookie.
Darland: We’re using their cocoa powder, we’re using their cookies in the mash. It’ll be a big one.
Tara Hankinson and Leann Darland at Talea Beer Co
Shoenthal: So those original hypotheses mostly played out, which was fantastic. How did you feel about some of the bets you took when March 2020 hit?
Hankinson: In July 2018 we started the LLC as a little side hustle, and our goal was to bring one beer to market and get it on the shelf at Whole Foods. Then we realized that was not the way to make money in our industry. So we started building a business plan, realizing that in order to do this we really needed to leave our jobs and build a brick & mortar where the margins were so much better.
Plus, if we really wanted to make our mark as a company, creating a physical space and creating our own experience was important. And the more research we started doing, we realized the experiences for the female beer consumer was lacking, plus New York City still has very few breweries per capita. There was a good business opportunity from both the target market we thought we could address authentically but also there was – and still is – room for more players here. NYC is a relatively young craft beer city and there’s still so much room to grow craft beer here.
We had to have all these uncomfortable discussions early on because our male counterparts advised us not to be co-CEOs. But we were both in it 50/50 from the start. We both quit our jobs and went unpaid. We put our personal assets into getting the brand up and running. So we went against their advice, and it was absolutely the right decision. We are truly co-CEOs.
Darland: We had our first beer in market in April 2019 (Sun Up, their flagship IPA.) We were driving around the city in our delivery van, brewing at a facility called Torch & Crown in the Bronx, and started fundraising for the space. We fundraised for a year, and signed the lease once we reached $1.5 Million.
Hankinson: Fundraising was interesting. We probably pitched about 400 VCs.
Darland: Most investors wanted us to be Skinny Girl for beer. Pink beer. Calorie count on the label. We were told women don’t drink beer because it makes them feel bloated.
Hankinson: White men in their 60’s totally have their finger on the pulse of what’s trending in Williamsburg. We went to friends, family, friends of friends, people who love beer and a couple of angel investors. So we have 116 investors total that we’re accountable to. Like you said, everyone wants to quit their corporate job and start a brewery and this is a way for people to be part of ours. Seeing all these people believe in us brings me to tears.
Darland: We signed the lease on this space on November 1, 2019. I was three months pregnant. The space was originally a cabinet manufacturer and a parking garage. It took a long time to get permits filed, and we were about to complete that process when the pandemic hit. At the same time, Tara found out she was pregnant in March 2020. By then I was eight months pregnant.
Shoenthal: So when you started this brewery, you were both pregnant with your first kids and navigating a global pandemic.
Darland: It was a lot. At first, we were still doing deliveries. And we both had difficult pregnancies. I remember being nauseous in the back of the van and the smell of the beer getting to me. The free rent period was up in November 2020. We didn’t even know if we were ever going to open. But we were too far deep to turn back.
We were actually so fortunate with our timeline. The capacity restrictions helped us ease in once we opened in March 2021. There was no seating at the bars because of how everything had to be spaced out. It gave us the ability to ease into running a taproom, and we had never done that before, so it wasn’t bad to have some time to go slowly and learn.
Hankinson: We were so desperate to make money before we opened, that for a couple of weeks we sold beer out of the loading dock entrance to our brewery. We set up a folding table and it was so cold that we put up a sign that said, “knock for beer.” It was so shady. But one Saturday we made $1,000. We were so worried about money that we didn’t even hire a general manager when we opened. We basically lived here for three months.
Meanwhile, my babies were seven weeks early. I lived in the hospital before giving birth. Leann’s mom passed away last spring while my babies were in the NICU. We were a two person company, opening a brewery while navigating personal trauma, going through the business pains while planning a funeral, living through a pandemic and caring for infants. It was a lot.
Shoenthal: I am so sorry to hear all of this. It’s such a testament that you’re still standing. Was it helpful to have each other to lean on while navigating all of this personal trauma while trying to open the business?
Darland: Words can’t express what Tara means to me. I am still blown away that we found each other. It’s a total marriage. We’re with each other more than we’re with our husbands and kids. You’d think we’d butt heads more, but it’s just been so solid. When stuff was happening with my mom I went home for a few weeks and totally relied on Tara.
Both of us being new moms was actually so helpful because of what we’ve built into our company culture. We both leave every day at five to go relieve our nannies. If you’re a cofounder and only one of you is doing that, I can see how that might lead to resentment. You don’t get the amount of commitment that comes with kids until you have them.
Hankinson: Everything we went through has just strengthened our relationship. We’re so similar in some ways but so different in others. Any differences we have are very complimentary. The few times we’ve gotten close to anger or frustration with each other, it’s because one of us cares a lot and feels really strongly about something. We have this motivation to make the business succeed for our families and for this family of employees - we now have ten full time employees. Becoming a parent and learning how to prioritize time really gives you perspective. It gave us the motivation to step back and delegate and rely on other people to help us.
There are a lot of childless people in hospitality because the industry is so unfriendly to people with children. The hours are long and unconventional. It's a physical job to brew beer and it's very unfriendly towards women or people who are not physically strong. The fact that we are both moms has motivated us to create a very different kind of company. Also if you don’t have kids, we respect that. People have things outside of work that are important to them, so if someone wants to leave to join their running club or just get home to cook dinner for once, we want to encourage that.
Darland: We could have been sucked into this job 24/7 if we didn’t have our families to pull us away. After I had Henry I’d have to pump in the van between deliveries, while driving around Manhattan.
Shoenthal: You’ve both been through a lot. What’s next for Talea?
Darland: We just opened our next round of fundraising. The minimum investment is $25,000 to fund our next 3-4 taprooms around New York and to even expand to other states. We have plans for two in Manhattan, one on the Upper East or Upper West and then downtown in SoHo or the meatpacking district, maybe a kiosk in Grand Central. Maybe the Hamptons.
Hankinson: We hire in an unconventional way. Part of our vision is that we want to make the craft beer consumer more diverse and we want to make the people who are employed in craft beer more diverse. Right now we have a lot of people on staff who never worked in hospitality or beer before, but that’s by design. We challenge ourselves to create the best possible culture, because we are from the corporate world and we saw a lot of what we don’t like. We’re looking for the person who will see a napkin on the floor and without anyone looking, they’ll pick it up and throw it away. That’s someone who respects the space.
We’re trying to make something that will grow and scale. But we’ve certainly learned that the way to success is never the fastest or cheapest route.
