New York's first female-owned brewery and tap room is in North Brooklyn

Talea opened a year into the pandemic, offering a refreshing alternative to the borough's danker and darker beerhalls

This is just another typical story about two young mothers—one a Navy veteran, both MBAs and home brewers—who ditched their corporate careers to open a brewery in Brooklyn with a cheery ambiance and an inclusive ethos focused on fruit-forward beers and modest ABVs. You know, that old chestnut.

Of all the breweries in America, only 2 percent are exclusively owned and operated by women. One such place, and the only such place in New York City, is Talea Beer Co., which opened in March in Williamsburg with a fresh approach to a venerable American business model.

The co-owners and co-CEOs, LeAnn Darland and Tara Hankinson, are steely with acumen and shiny with good vibes. They met while working at the home-keg delivery startup Hopsy and immediately recognized their personal and professional stars colliding.

“Everyone’s gotten drunk and said they want to start a brewery at one point,” says Hankinson. “But within a year of meeting each other, we needed to quit our jobs, start fundraising and start selling beer.”

This was 2018. After months of fundraising, they signed a lease on a corner space in Williamsburg, a massive, former warehouse in need of a massive renovation. They broke ground in 2019 and opened at the one year anniversary of the onset of the pandemic, in March of 2021. The industrial-chic interior space is open and bright, with lofted ceilings, muted colors and large windows that fill the elegant, minimalist confines with natural light.

The cool, spacious environs, easily imagined as a laptop-friendly cafe (which it doubles as), has a decidedly 2021-centric appeal of breathing room and sanitized surfaces: This is no dank beer hall with soaked floors and sweaty walls. It’s a bright space of metal and glass, plaster and plants, with a capacity of 185 people at wooden tables or on tiled floors (with room for another 185 more at the street-side table seating and garden).

The decor is harmonious with the products, a fruit-forward collection of craft beers more reminiscent of an aromatic cocktail or the kind of tinted wines you can drink all day (and which are also available at Talea). These are not your bearded-bros kind of beers with head-snapping hops and ABVs that could stagger a linebacker in two pints. And this, like the carefully curated interior, is by design as an intention to attract a different kind of consumer.

“What we find is someone who says, ‘I don’t like beer, but I love cocktails.’ Our beers are great for them. They can be a little sweet, a little sour, very fruit forward, and sort of full bodied. So, you know, it’s like a gateway to a new kind of beer drinker,” says Darland. “Our company philosophy is ‘easy to love.’ We want everyone to be able to find a beer on the menu that’s delicious to them.”

This gateway is definitely directed toward women who are on average about 30 percent of the beer drinking market but 70 percent of the visitors to Talea Beer Co. Included in this target are also communities not traditionally attracted to tap rooms.

Virginia Valenzuela, arts editor at SuperRare, is new to the neighborhood and appreciates the Talea ethos. “I moved here from the East Village earlier in the year, and I was so happy to find Talea,” she says. “There’s lots of places to drink in Williamsburg, for sure, but nothing I’ve found that really reflects the diversity of the neighborhood. I’m not even much of a craft beer drinker, but I’m coming around.”