Sarah Hallonquist and Loretta Andro Chung have spent years creating spaces, throwing parties, and raising funds for the LGBTQ+ community of New York City. Which is to say: lesbians, bisexual women and non-binary people, trans folk, and basically, anyone else who identifies as queer but isn’t a cisgender man. And, you know, dykes.

Last autumn, they started brewing beer for them as well.

Dyke Beer, a young contract brewery based in and around New York, came out of a previous dyke-focused project. Loretta was among a group of people to launch the Dyke Bar Takeover series, which Sarah later became involved with as well.

“Basically the concept was, a straight bar would be taken over by dykes, so, lesbians, queer women, bisexual women, transgender folks, non-binary folks, would go into the bar and there would be some kind of music or burlesque or other queer artist performers happening,” Sarah says.

They would charge a modest cover fee, usually about $10, and the funds would go toward paying the performers. Any remaining proceeds would then be donated to a local LGBTQ+ organisation like SAGE or the Ali Forney Center, or sometimes farther-away communities, like LGBTQ organisations in Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria in 2017.

Dyke Bar Takeover was so named because of its radical connotation as a reclaimed slur, but also for reasons of inclusivity. There aren’t really any terms that refer to all the various queer identities that might feel out of place in a traditional gay bar. But given that lesbians, bisexual women, non-binary people, trans women, trans men, and more have been known to self-identify as dykes, it might be the closest we’ve got. Seeking to serve that same nebulous population, Dyke Beer inherited the name.

““They expect you to fail automatically, and they even say it out loud as they’re drinking the beer. What’s funny is, it totally seems to be this unconscious, knee-jerk reaction.””

— Sarah Hallonquist, Dyke Beer

If you’re a queer woman in New York, you’ve likely done your time hanging around the West Village at Cubbyhole or Henrietta Hudson, the two best-known lesbian bars in the city (and, possibly, the world). They’re the places to be for $2 margaritas, flirting with strangers, and running into your exes. They’re also two of just three or four expressly lesbian bars in New York City.

The Lesbian Bar Project estimates that in the late 1980s, there were around 200 lesbian bars in the USA. Of now, the count is approximately 21. Apart from Cubbyhole and Hen’s, there’s Ginger’s in Brooklyn, a smattering of generally queer-identified bars and venues, and then virtually countless traditional gay bars, catering mostly to a cis male clientele. Hence, Dyke Bar Takeover was an effort to make space for the underrepresented factions of New York’s queer population.

Then, COVID-19 happened, and in March 2020, nightlife—gay and straight—screeched to a halt. As weeks and then months of lockdown ensued, Loretta and Sarah weren’t content to just hibernate until partying became possible again. With Loretta’s head for logistics and Sarah’s background in homebrewing, the idea to launch their very own brewery emerged. And in autumn 2020, Dyke Bar Takeover gave birth to Dyke Beer.

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Starting with minimal resources, real estate was not going to be a part of the original business plan. Sarah and Loretta started contract brewing, utilising other breweries’ facilities to make their product. Their very first beer—the eponymously named Dyke Beer—made in collaboration with Wild East Brewing in Gowanus, Brooklyn, was a Belgian-style saison brewed using hops from New York state. They’ve since released their Tall Girl Gose, made with Greenpoint Beer & Ale Co., and most recently at the time of writing, a pumpkin-infused Märzen called Witch, Please.

Rather than starting with a core collection of more keystone styles like pale ales and pilsners, Loretta and Sarah jumped right to making the beers they really wanted to make: less common styles with unique flavour combinations.

“I don’t want to just create another pale ale. I want to create beers that are slightly different, but aren’t scary,” Sarah tells me. “I think with Dyke Beer, we’re never gonna have the funkiest farmhouse ale, we’re never gonna have the most sour beer your lips have ever tasted. We’re gonna have beers that are easy to drink, but introduce you to new styles like saison or gose.”

A saison, being Sarah’s personal favourite style, was the obvious choice for their first brew. Within its colourful pink and blue can, featuring a dog and cat playing pool, is a farmhouse ale with a subtle, fruity funk to it, hints of white pepper, and a sweet malty finish. It debuted last January and it’s smooth, made full and soft through the use of wheat and oat while still carrying a nicely-packaged, subtle spice amidst tea-like notes—sort of like a hug from a longtime friend.

It’s as likely to impress a seasoned craft beer drinker as a newbie. Which is the point: Loretta and Sarah set out to brew approachable, highly drinkable beers that are accessible to every kind of beer drinker, and even those who don’t consider themselves beer people at all.

“We like to say we’re making these gateway beers into the craft community,” Sarah says, “so for folks who maybe haven’t ever had a craft beer, who are lesbians, dykes, bi women, whatever, maybe they can experience this world a little bit more.”

Though they hope their beers can be “gateway” beers, they’re not just putting out beers with mass-market appeal. The pair thought the tangy, salty style of their gose, for example, was actually a great way to show how interesting beer can be to those who may have only ever tried, say, Pabst Blue Ribbon or Bud Light. It’s brought to life by the addition of blackberries, raspberries, and lingonberries. It’s a milder kind of tartness, not quite as mouth-puckering or astringent as gose can sometimes be, so it goes down easy on a hot day. The salinity is detectable but not aggressive, and the sweet-tart fruit flavours lead the way.

No matter how much beer you’ve tried, you’ve never had one quite like this—they were actually the first U.S. brewery to utilise lingonberry in a commercially sold beer. In fact, they had to fight the FDA for approval to use the fruit.

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Perhaps unsurprisingly, they’ve been met with some scepticism—Sarah shared that many men, upon trying one of their beers for the first time, express surprise to discover that beers bearing the label “DYKE” in all caps are actually good. “They expect you to fail automatically, and they even say it out loud as they’re drinking the beer,” she says. “What’s funny is, it totally seems to be this unconscious, knee-jerk reaction.”

Sarah and Loretta want their beers to be anything but boring, which is another reason why they’ve been choosing styles you don’t always see on tap lists. The flavours they choose, in true camp fashion, nod to the kind of brews some consider “bitch beers”—berries, pumpkin, the kind of additions that make beer taste a little less like straight malt and hops, and a little more like a fruity cocktail or fancy coffee drink.

Even today, with the world of craft beer as creative and diverse in flavours as it is, there are people who will write these beers off as frivolous, feminised, or as not “real” beers. (Even I will occasionally hesitate before ordering a pumpkin or fruit beer, out of fear of looking like a stereotypical femme who doesn’t really like beer.) But Dyke Beer’s spins on these oft-ridiculed ingredients have been not only elevated and elegant, but clever and downright intellectual.

““For folks who maybe haven’t ever had a craft beer, who are lesbians, dykes, bi women, whatever, maybe they can experience this world a little bit more.””

— Sarah Hallonquist, Dyke Beer

Their autumn 2021 release, Witch, Please, combined the two major players in autumn seasonal beer—Oktoberfest-style lagers (or Festbier) and pie-in-a-glass pumpkin ales. They took the pumpkin variety and blend of spices into careful consideration, tweaking the standard flavours just a bit, and most notably infused them into a Märzen lager rather than an ale. The result is a delicately sweet, subtly pumpkin-flavoured beer that’s as crisp and refreshing as any Festbier. The concoction came to be, in part, because of Sarah’s northeastern roots.

“I’m from Massachusetts, so we used a different New England pumpkin [than the standard breed]. And I think we went a little different in the spices,” she says. “Most [pumpkin] beers tend to be ales, but we decided to do a lager—the flavour wouldn’t be as heavy with pumpkin.”

When we spoke in October 2021, Sarah was in the process of ideating their next beer. She shared that she has been studying herbalism as of late, and is interested in how traditional Chinese and Eastern European medicine could coincide with beer. Juniper and mint, for example, is a combination she’s had in mind. Whatever they end up going with, it’s certain to be interesting.

Art and innovation, for them, are a greater priority right now than brewing popular styles guaranteed to be commercially successful. Speaking about her identity as a lesbian, and Loretta’s as a non-binary person of colour, Sarah said that as new voices coming to the table, they want to bring their own perspective.

“We’re coming from an angle of new and unique,” she says.“I don’t want to just regurgitate the same beer styles and say, ‘what do people tend to like?’ And just mimic that. No—I want to create new flavours.”

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The original mission of Dyke Bar Takeover is alive and well within Dyke Beer as a brewery: creating space and community for the queer community’s underserved members. Each of their cans, so far, has featured a blurb about a lesbian or queer bar they want to support. And since the Covid-19 vaccine has allowed life to return somewhat, they’ve been hosting a ton of events to appeal to queers of all stripes—speed dating, drag, live music, and even a dog costume party for Halloween.

They’re still collecting funds to put toward charity and community causes, and this past year they’ve collaborated several times with Dave’s Lesbian Bar–a Queens, New York-based pop-up whose founders are raising money to open it up as a bonafide, brick-and-mortar bar in a permanent space. Sarah puts it simply: “We’re about creating community in a real way. We’re about bringing people together.”

It’s this genuine commitment to the community that earned Dyke Beer its earliest allies. Tyler March, co-founder of Brooklyn’s Wild East Brewing, shares that his team was open to sharing facilities and know-how with the nascent company because of its mission and methods.

“We don’t normally do contract brewing, but this was entirely different,” Tyler says. “They were looking to launch a beer specifically for an underserved community and create awareness around the closing of dyke bars across the US, while also raising money to open their own dyke bar establishment. It was something we really wanted to support and help get started.”

And of course, the response from the city’s queer bars has been enthusiastic. It’s being served at Cubbyhole and Hen’s, of course, and Brooklyn’s flagship lesbian watering hole, Ginger’s. Brendan Donohoe, one of the owners of Ginger’s, was eager to include Dyke Beer in the bar’s growing beer program.

“As soon as I knew that I had the capability of bringing them into my own queer space,” he says, “as a queer person, it was a no brainer.”

But Brendan made clear that identity is really just the icing on the cake. “Dyke Beer is a delicious beer, it’s not hard to sell it,” he says. And indeed, it’s served at Rivercrest, another bar Brendan works with, in the Astoria neighbourhood of Queens. Rivercrest is a sports and craft beer bar—not an expressly queer space—and Dyke Beer fits right in here as well.

“Any cool beer bar should easily carry Dyke Beer, if it’s to be evaluated based off the actual beer you're drinking,” Brendan says, since it “stands up against some of the best.” The fall release, Witch, Please, resonated particularly well with customers at Ginger’s. “I’m looking forward to seeing what Dyke Beer does next,” he says, “because I know they have something coming. So let’s watch this space.”

Yet, in securing distribution for their beers, Sarah and Loretta have been repeatedly reminded of precisely why dyke-identified spaces are still so necessary. They’ve experienced a whole spectrum of pushback from different bars in the city, from folks who seem to have simply never thought about queer women as a market for beer (or at all), to more prickly receptions—even in some gay bars and clubs.

“I don’t know if they want to support dykes. I don’t know if they want queer women in these spaces,” Sarah tells me.

A long-term but very real goal for Dyke Beer is, of course, to open their own physical space somewhere in the city, maybe one of Bushwick’s airy industrial lofts. The core idea is a brewhouse and taproom, but Sarah’s ideas are sprawling: a dance club, a restaurant, a cat café as a sober space option. “I want all the things, all the things for us,” she says. “I basically have a mega complex in my head that I want to build.”

Most dyke bars in existence are dive bars, and Dyke Beer wants to present its community with more, varied, ritzier options. Don’t misunderstand, they love dive bars—who doesn’t?—but Sarah and Loretta feel strongly that there should be dyke-affirming spaces that are more upscale, too. “I think our community deserves that,” she tells me. “You deserve nice things. We deserve nice things.”

This basic premise of giving dykes nice things was one of their motivations for pushing craft beer into queer dives that tend to serve bottom-rung beer options. Queer people shouldn’t have to choose between drinking a decent beer and going somewhere that feels safe and welcoming.

That said, Sarah and Loretta aren’t limiting their beers to any specific demographic. You can find Dyke Beer by the can at a whole swathe of bars, restaurants, and shops throughout the NYC boroughs of Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens. They’ve been received enthusiastically by woman-owned bars, queer-ish bars, vegetarian restaurants, and bars that just really love craft beer. There’s an unexpectedly powerful sort of allyship in a non-dyke, such as a straight dude, proudly swigging from a bright can that says “DYKE” on it.

It’s not always an insult or a dirty word; it’s not even taboo, really. It’s just good beer.