Making beer is sweaty, physical labor. Brewers lug 50-pound sacks up a catwalk before mixing hundreds of pounds of barley with hot water in a kettle. Leaning in, they thoroughly stir the thick, 150-degree porridge. After straining with more hot water while draining the brewing liquid, they shovel wet grain, now doubled in size, from the steaming vessel.

The brewer stereotype is guys with beards. They tend not to look like Michelle Piechowicz, the petite head brewer and assistant distiller at Birmingham’s Dread River Distilling Co., which opened downtown this summer.

When visiting other breweries, Piechowicz says she initially has a hard time convincing male counterparts that she, too, brews professionally and helps make vodka, gin, whiskey, rum, and other liquors.

“I’d get weird looks like, ‘No you don’t,’” says Piechowicz, who learned her craft in North Carolina.

She is one among several local women in the spirits profession—ladies of liquor, if you will—who are making an imprint in Birmingham.

In 2018, about a year after moving to Birmingham from Brooklyn, New York, Laura Newman became the first woman to win the U.S. leg of the Diageo World Class competition, considered the industry’s supreme test of cocktail-making and hospitality skills. She placed second worldwide in the global finals that fall.

Weeks later, she and fiancé Larry “Mudd” Townley opened Queen’s Park, the latest jewel in downtown Birmingham’s craft cocktail scene. The bar transforms annually into a Christmas-themed pop-up bar, Miracle on 24th Street. The couple also is planning to open a second bar soon.

At LeNell’s Beverage Boutique in Norwood—where employees undergo 6–12 months of intensive training—LeNell Camacho Santa Ana specializes in top-shelf liquors unavailable at state-run ABC stores, as well as in small-label organic and biodynamic wines made by women and black vintners.

Her regular product tastings, which draw dozens to her tiny store, are both educational and entertaining. Every detail is considered—proper glassware, snacks, and sometimes even a music playlist. “We have a list of expectations we give reps,” Camacho Santa Ana says. “And at the top: ‘We’re storytellers. We expect you to come here with a good story.’”

These are the stories of three determined, driven, and formidable women who bring a refreshing, nurturing perspective to the spirits industry. Each cites a commitment to building community by collaborating, networking, educating, and mentoring.

“We’ve got to do that as women to change this industry,” Camacho Santa Ana says.

Brewing a Passion

A Connecticut native who loves traveling, backpacking, and kayaking, Piechowicz drifted to Charlotte, North Carolina soon after college to escape miserably cold northeast winters. She became fascinated by the beer-making process while working as taproom manager for a micobrewery there. Piechowicz asked if she could help out, and soon she was making 10-gallon specialty brews and eventually full 310-gallon batches.

A committed apprentice, she hit the brewery at 9 a.m., worked there until 4 p.m., and then moved to her regular taproom job until 2 a.m. She eventually moved to the brewery fulltime, leaving behind her taproom duties.

Her boyfriend, Carl White, worked at a nearby distillery. Piechowicz started hanging out there, learning how to make whiskey and other spirits when she wasn’t brewing beer. When Dread River recruited White for its new distilling program, he said he was a package deal. The couple moved to Birmingham in mid-2017.

Piechowicz’s brewing experience pays dividends for Dread River, located in a corner building on Seventh Avenue South at 24th Street that includes an event space, tasting room/bar, and restaurant. Since Dread River sells liquor made onsite, by law they only are allowed to serve their own products in their taproom.

Dread River’s taps feature five of Piechowicz’s beers and a house-made cider. She also prepares grain-based mashes for distilling.

Piechowicz speculates that more women would brew if more were exposed to craft beer. When she and her peers reached drinking age, beer was a guy thing.

“I never heard a bunch of girls saying, ‘Let’s go to a brewery,’” says Piechowicz, who mostly drank craft beer with her brothers and male friends. “If you’re not going to breweries or enjoying craft beer, you’re not likely to want to go into the industry.”

When women visit Dread River’s brewery, Piechowicz takes time to chat about beer and brewing, encouraging them to explore different styles.

Creating a recipe, bringing it to foaming life, and watching people enjoy it are immensely satisfying, Piechowicz says. “I’ll look around to see who has a beer. When they’re smiling or laughing I tell myself, ‘I had a part in that.’”

Whiskey Woes

Women are under-represented among competitive bartenders, brewers, and liquor retailers. Nearly 56 percent of bartenders are female, according to Data USA. But only 8 percent of the 60 Diageo World Class contestants in Berlin were women. Newman was the only female in the final four.

Among Alabama’s 50 breweries, only three feature a woman as head brewer, the Alabama Brewers Guild says. A 2014 Auburn University national study showed only four percent of breweries put women in charge of brew-room planning and production.

Disrespect, mansplaining, and misogyny remain all too common.

After nearly 30 years in the liquor business, Camacho Santa Ana has seen double standards applied in both overt and subtle ways. A friend raising capital for her spirits brand was told by a potential investor that she must sign a document agreeing not to have children if she took his money.

A man in the whiskey business once chided Camacho Santa Ana for dropping a barnyard expletive. “I didn’t even throw out my full string of favorites,” says the sometimes-salty shopkeeper. “He was like, ‘Young lady you will not use that language with me!’ If I was a man would he have said the same thing? Probably not.”

LeNell knows whiskey like Bo knows football. She was an early champion of Pappy Van Winkle bourbon, which now has cult status among collectors. She co-started a whiskey brand. A bourbon-centric bottle shop she owned in Brooklyn was Whiskey Magazine’s U.S Retailer of the Year three consecutive times.

But men she knows in the business still can be patronizing. “Even in situations where we’re making decisions on picking a whiskey,” she says, “all of a sudden it’s a man’s thing and you’re like the pretty thing standing on the side in really good shoes.”

Newman has had similar encounters. “I’ve had male guests be super resistant to me helping them with whiskey,” she says. “But if you give good hospitality and you’re nice about showing that you know more about whiskey than anyone else you work with, maybe next time they won’t treat someone that way.”

Top-Shelf Skills

Love lured Newman to Birmingham. When she lost her apartment lease in Brooklyn, long-distance boyfriend (and now fiancé) “Mudd” Townley suggested she temporarily stay with him in Birmingham while scouting other cities to open a cocktail bar.

But while visiting Atlanta, Nashville, and Houston, she realized she also was in love with the Magic City. Newman and Townley (formerly of Dave’s Pub and Bell Bottoms) decided to open Queen’s Park in downtown’s loft district.

Newman arrived with a rich résumé. She is a certified sommelier and culinary school graduate. She makes presentations at national cocktail conventions, and has been a regional and national finalist in several bartending competitions.

The 2018 Diageo World Class competition was Newman’s third try there. Contestants at the regional and national levels get an escalating series of challenges, such as making 10 complex cocktails in 10 minutes while engaging the judges with stories about the drinks—“and not looking like you’re having a meltdown,” Newman says.

The plans for Queen’s Park were underway as Newman prepared for last year’s Diageo finals in Berlin. She had to create cocktails and throw a party representing her home and country, using designated spirits and ingredients.

“I had 5½ weeks to come up with these spectacular show-stopping things,” Newman says. “Fortunately [Townley] was able to take on a lot of responsibilities for Queen’s Park.”

She even hired a storytelling coach for the global finals. But after developing a vicious case of pneumonia that killed her voice, Newman practically had to whisper those stories into the judges’ ears.

Her competition days are over. “Once you own a bar you can’t,” Newman says. “I’m really proud I came extremely close at globals. I feel it’s a good note to end.”

Queen’s Park first opened last year as the Miracle pop-up, part of a nationwide event with holiday decorations and an elaborate cocktail menu (it starts November 25 this year). Queen’s Park officially debuted in January.

Birmingham reminds Newman of Brooklyn Heights, where she grew up. Folks know each other and greet by name. “There is a sense of neighborliness that I really love,” she says. “I feel I am a part of this community.”

Straight-Up Advice

Women in the alcohol industry, like many in other male-dominated fields, believe that mentoring and networking are the keys to retaining women, helping them advance, and encouraging them to take ownership roles.

“How do we make it friendly for women, especially those raising families?” Camacho Santa Ana says. “Whether you’re waiting tables, in the kitchen, bartending—how do you stay in the business?”

Newman says part of her role as co-owner of Queen’s Park is mentoring women on her staff, whether it’s by enhancing skills behind the bar or by strategizing how to increase the number of women building credentials by winning bartending contests.

“I didn’t have a bar mentor,” she says. “I had no one to coach me through competitions. So it’s very meaningful to be able to do that for my staff.”

Piechowicz credits a network of what she calls “cool beer chicks” for inspiring her and building confidence when she started. They’d share beer recipes, discuss flavor profiles of ingredients or combinations, and get deep into technical details.

“It was neat to hang out and talk with women who also have a passion for brewing,” she says.

Camacho Santa Ana says her own struggles as a single mother running a business that’s open days and evenings (her daughter’s night-care facility recently closed) augments her empathy for all working women.

She plans to open a café next to the bottle shop, with an eye toward providing in-house child care for employees. She also would like to start a business incubator for women.

“We can create an environment that mentors women opening their own businesses and helps them do it smartly,” she says. “So many of us long for someone to take us under their wing—[to tell us] this is how you read a P&L, how you look for a good accountant, the ABCs and XYZs.”

A Second Round

Born Tanya LeNell Smothers, the Fort Payne native has history in Birmingham. In the 1990s, she graduated with top honors from Birmingham Southern College, and earned a master’s degree at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

After moving to New York in 2000, she sold wine wholesale and retail before opening the original LeNell’s in 2003 in Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood.

New York Magazine named it Best Liquor Store in 2006. In addition to tabbing LeNell’s as three-time U.S. Retailer of the Year, Whiskey Magazine also declared her store Global Retailer of the Year in 2008.

But Camacho Santa Ana was forced to close the business in 2009 after losing its lease. She moved to Mexico briefly and ran a bar with her future husband, Demian Camacho Santa Ana.

While considering cities and locations in which to reopen LeNell’s, she happened upon an online ad for a needs-work mansion and property at the edge of Norwood. She returned to Birmingham in 2011. But a baby—Damiana, now 7—a divorce, and limited capital delayed that dream.

Open since June 2018, LeNell’s blends whimsy and femininity with a superior selection. A ceramic bathtub displays liquor bottles. On Fluevog Fridays, Camacho Santa Ana offers discounts for women wearing her favorite designer shoes.

There’s a baby-changing station in the bathroom and a playground outside. Women usually are the primary family caregivers, doing the household shopping and picking up wine for a dinner party, Camacho Santa Ana explains. They appreciate the accommodation.

A storyteller at heart, much of Camacho Santa Ana’s employee training focuses on teaching the tales behind every bottle in stock.

Come across wine made by Ntsiki Biyela, and you’ll hear a story about a maid who, on a lark, sought and won a winemaking scholarship taught in a language she had yet to learn. She became an award-winning winemaker and the first black woman in South Africa to start a wine label. Biyela realized, as Camacho Santa Ana tells it, a dream she didn’t know she had.

“Women winemakers are a big thing with me,” she says. “In wine, it’s still very much a white man’s world.”

Spirited Growth

Piechowicz, Newman, and Camacho Santa Ana have brought new perspectives to the spirits scene in Birmingham, and they’re finding a receptive audience.

All three women see momentum building in the city’s drink scene similar to what’s happened in Birmingham’s dining scene, with more quality offerings for all tastes. Queen’s Park, LeNell’s, and Dread River are just the latest contributors to the scene’s maturation, but far from the last.

The local brewing scene, for example, has plenty of room for continued growth, says Piechowicz, pointing to much-smaller cities like Asheville, North Carolina, which supports some 30 breweries. Brewpubs and neighborhood-oriented microbreweries will find their own niches, next to the big boys like Good People and its subsidiary, Avondale Brewing, she says.

Newman says many friends opening high-end cocktail bars in other cities found themselves schooling their customers about their craft. Between Birmingham’s James Beard-awarded restaurants and their progeny, and the influx of young professionals from other cities, no such learning curve stunted Queen’s Park.

“People here already understand,” Newman says. “It’s actually really fun to open up a food-related business in that zeitgeist.”

Details

Dread River Distilling Co. | 2400 7th Ave. S. | dreadriver.com

Queen’s Park | 112 24th St. N. | queensparkbham.com

LeNell’s Beverage Boutique | 1208 32nd St. N. | lenells.com

This story appears in Birmingham magazine’s November 2019 issue. Subscribe today!