Startup Stories: Brewing Beer and Giving Employees a New Start
Tess Hart ’17 and Bill Popwell ’16 founded Triple Bottom Brewing Company, which hires and trains employees left out of the mainstream economy.
To mark the 10-year anniversary of Yale SOM’s Program on Entrepreneurship, we’re checking in with alums who benefitted from the program’s resources when launching their ventures.
When Tess Hart ’17 enrolled in the joint MBA/MEM degree program at Yale SOM and the Yale School of the Environment, she planned to eventually work in international development. But she and her husband Bill Popwell ’16 also had a dream: to run a social impact-focused brewery. The idea began to take shape more seriously in a class Hart took on nonprofit management with the late professor and Yale SOM dean Sharon Oster.
“We had to develop a business plan for a nonprofit or social enterprise and pitch it to the class,” Hart says. “I remember being nervous to share the idea, but the class responded really well to the concept of taking a product so simple and using that as a vehicle to do something much bigger.”
Hart and Popwell developed the concept further in the course Start-up Founders Practicum. Hart took courses on economic development and social entrepreneurship, and pitched the brewery at the Social Impact Lab, a weekly event that connects students to leaders in the social sector.
In 2017, Hart and Popwell co-founded Triple Bottom Brewing Company, a certified B Corp named for its three bottom lines: beer, people, and the environment. The Philadelphia brewery, which opened its doors in 2019, offsets its electricity use with renewable energy credits and works with local nonprofits to hire and train people who have been left out of the mainstream economy, including people who have been impacted by the justice system or experienced homelessness or gun violence. This summer, with a grant from the Barra Foundation, they launched an 16-week apprenticeship program in which they will hire and train people who can then work at their brewery or other local employers.
SOM, Hart says, gave her the freedom to explore her dream.
“I don’t know that I would have done that without that safe space of taking risks and having support to ask questions,” she says.
Triple Bottom Brewing has had to evolve—COVID struck six months after the company launched launch and required the team to adjust on the fly—but Hart says, “we’re great at being a place for our team members to learn and grow and find a career path that feels supportive and fair.”
And on top of all that, Hart promises, they make good beer. “We can’t stand on our mission alone,” she says.
