Denizens Brewery Q&A

At first glance, Julie Verratti’s is a quintessentially Washington, D.C. story. Born and raised just outside the city, Verratti worked on political campaigns and for the Small Business Administration (SBA). She met her wife while fundraising for the Democratic National Committee. 

 

Washington is a company town, and the business is politics. But in Denver or Boulder? It’s beer. Her brother-in-law had worked as a professional brewer in Pennsylvania and Colorado, but in 2012, there wasn’t much of a craft beer scene in the D.C. area. She decided to leave her job at the SBA to change that.

 

That year, Verratti, her wife Emily and her brother-in-law Jeff sat down and stopped “talking around the edges” of opening their own brewery. They started planning, but there was a problem. Local, Prohibition-era laws made their business model illegal. To serve alcohol, for example, breweries also had to serve food – an additional barrier to entry. In addition to the other stresses of starting a business, Verratti and her team began advocating for new legislation in the local government. If the bill failed, their brewery could never open its doors. Through persistence and some choice calls, the bill was passed and Denizens Brewing Co. was born.

 

A year later in 2013, Verratti and her family successfully — and legally — opened the first Denizens location in Verratti’s hometown of Silver Spring, Maryland. It was the first production brewery in Montgomery County. 

 

Over ten years later, Denizens still stands, although at a new location in Riverdale Park. I called Verratti to find out why she fought to start a business that initially wasn’t permitted to exist.

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This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

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Do you remember your first beer? 

 

The first beer I ever tasted was when I was a little kid and my dad let me sneak a sip from one of his beers at dinner or whatever… My dad was a part of it. It was a Scottish ale, because that's the kind of style that my dad really enjoys, and I tried that. Nowadays, that's probably a little bit too heavy for my taste, but I remember being surprised at all the complexity in the drink… I always thought that beer was just this crappy, watered-down thing and it wasn't… And then I started home brewing at one point. This was in the early 2000s, so over 20 years ago, I started home brewing and getting into the science behind it and the art behind it.

 

So you started home brewing in the early 2000s. When did the idea form that you could go a little bigger and start a brewery?

 

That really started in like 2011, 2012. Just to be totally clear, I do not make the beer at Denizens, and if I did, it would not be in business. [Laughs.] However much I enjoy the art and science behind doing it, I'm not very good at it. But my brother-in-law Jeff — who’s professionally trained and knows what he’s doing — he makes the beer. So probably around 2011, 2012 is when we really seriously started having conversations about opening a brewery on a commercial level.

 

Your website says you had dinner one night with your wife and brother-in-law, the cofounders of Denizens, and that was when you decided to take the jump. 

 

That was the catalyst. We were at Christmas dinner. It was December of 2012. We had been talking around the edges of it. We had the conversation at dinner: ‘Let’s do it. Let’s get started.’ ... We slow-walked it throughout the year of 2013. We formed the LLC, started doing some fundraising, talking to banks, looking for locations, and we signed the lease in November of 2013 for our first location in Silver Spring.

 

You were rejected by 12 out of 13 banks for a loan to start Denizens. How did you persevere through difficulties at the beginning of this endeavor? 

 

It had to work out because it had to work out. We had raised about $250,000 from private investors and we had spent all of their money already. We’re going to get this bank loan one way or another. We’re getting these damn doors open. We’re not going to have just done that and not have anything to show for it… During that time period, we actually got the laws changed in Maryland to create the business model.

 

So you were building the bar while you were changing the legislation to permit the bar? 

 

Yes, exactly. Being in my mid-40s now, there's no way on earth I would take that kind of crazy risk. But when you're young and don't really have much responsibility, you’re just like, ‘Screw it, let’s give it a shot.’ Entrepreneurship is sometimes considered a young person’s game, and I think it's for that reason. You’ve got to do some crazy, risky stuff. 

 

I'm talking to the point where the bank would not close on the loan until the governor had signed the legislation into law. Even though it had been unanimously passed in the House, unanimously passed in the Senate, it would be overridden immediately [by a veto]. They wouldn’t give us the money until the governor signed it. 

 

So I had to pull out all the stops and somehow get in touch with the chief of staff to the governor — who at the time was Martin O’Malley — and I just threw a long shot: ‘Hey, can you get your boss to sign this legislation? Is it an emergency for us? Yes. Does it mean anything to the state? No. But could he do this?’ 

 

And he did. He signed it early and we were able to get our money the next day, which was great because we had completely run out of funds. So it was pretty nuts.

 

Wow. Did your experience with the SBA impact your entrepreneurship? 

 

I would actually say my experience working in political campaigns prepared me the most for starting Denizens and operating it.

 

How so?

 

Well, any political campaign is a startup. You’re just working all the time. There’s tons of energy. There’s a singular focus. You do everything you can. There’s no red tape or bureaucracy, you just have an idea and start doing it. It’s really a type of career that is default-to-action 100% — and starting a business is absolutely that same thing. 

 

And I would say that a political campaign also is about sales. You’re selling people on either your candidate or your issue or whatever it is you’re doing. Any type of business that you start, at its very core, everything you do is sales. So, that is my main role at Denizens. I do all the sales, wholesale business development. I do a lot of the marketing… all of that stuff I learned from doing political work. How do you sell someone on an idea? How do I sell someone on a product? I would say that prepared me the most.

 

I’m amazed your first entrepreneurial venture was a brewery concept that the local laws didn’t even allow. What fueled that drive?

 

Well, first I'd back up a little bit and say that I, my entire life, have been somewhat entrepreneurial. When I was in college, I had my own specialty coffee catering business that I would do. You could hire me for private parties at events. I was a personal trainer at one point, and I had my own private client list that I would do…

 

[While working for the Small Business Administration] I traveled a lot of the country and I got to meet a lot of small business owners. Throughout that experience, you just get inspired meeting people, and you see, okay, you had this crazy idea, and then you went for it, and here you are now.

 

Are there any specific examples that come to mind?

 

There was this water company that I found really, really fascinating that was trying to solve access to water issues in their town… 

 

And it was less about the product itself, I mean, it was just water. [It was] just the way they talked about the business and how much they believed in it, and how much they were there to help people. Their mission really was just to take care of people and they're doing it by providing water. 

 

Denizens’ slogan is “unified by beer.” I get the sense that there’s also a strong ethos of community in your business, except you serve something just a bit stronger than water.

 

We like to say that everyone has a seat at our table. We make a beer for every palette. What I love about beer is… it is the every person’s drink. It is the most approachable. It is the drink of moderation. It is the drink that, if you're sitting around a fire with your friends or at a table with your friends and family, it might loosen you up a little bit, but it's not going to get you — excuse the language — shitfaced to the point where you're embarrassing yourself. 

 

I think it does open people up to be more intimate with each other and really share who they are. Especially this day and age, when people are so used to staying at home and not interacting face to face the more that social media has taken over people's lives, having a beer with friends and family — or a stranger you just met — is a fast track to creating more deep relationships and building community. We believed that back then, and I believe it now more than ever.

 

Wow. Is there a person in your life who instilled or inspired this sense of community for you?

 

I don’t know if there’s a person in my life, but the life that I've had has always been very community-focused. I switched schools a lot as a kid, and so I was constantly in different, new situations. I learned how to be adaptable as a person. I picked up this extra-tuned sense of empathy for people who feel like they're maybe not fitting in, but I want to bring them to the table… 

 

Everyone's allowed to be here, whether you are someone who is obsessed with every type of hop parietal that ever existed and you know all of them like a dictionary, or you're someone who's just thirsty and wants to try a beer for the first time. We want to make everybody feel comfortable. No one's an outsider. Everyone has a seat at our table. That’s our approach.

 

Brewing is a male-dominated industry. Have you faced challenges in that regard? 

 

Remember, we’re in the D.C. area. It’s pretty progressive. No one’s gonna be like, ‘You’re a lady, get out of here!’ right? No one’s doing that, but I will say this: I think that there’s an unconscious bias that happens. The Brewers Association, which is the national trade organization for small breweries, ran a study on this a few years ago… basically what they found out was consumers will either think that you are a brewery that makes good beer, or you’re a brewery that is owned by a woman. …

 

We don’t also hold ourselves out as women-owned anymore. We did in the very beginning. We don’t do it anymore. We stopped doing that about six or seven years ago. 

 

Really? For that reason?

 

For this reason, and because we didn’t want to alienate people. I want people to drink our beer because they want to drink our beer. I don't want them to drink our beer because we happen to be women-owned. If people are excited we’re women-owned, great! I love that support. But that’s not the reason people should be drinking Denizens.