Greenwood Brewing Taps the Female Beer Market

Greenwood Brewing is a woman-owned and -operated microbrewery with a taproom, brewery and beer garden located in Downtown Phoenix. The company makes more than 20 products in its Downtown Phoenix brewery for consumption in its taproom, restaurants, bars and grocery/retail stores throughout Arizona. Greenwood Brewery’s flagship beers that are distributed statewide include award-winning Rosemary IPA, Purpose Pilsner, award-winning Herstory Pale Ale and Emera Hazy IPA, with two seasonal beers — Harvest Diem Spiced Ale and award-winning Blueberry Wheat — distributed statewide seasonally.

Megan Greenwood founded her company in 2017 after having been home brewing multiple times a month out of her garage. She had been working in Corporate America and would often take her customers out to have important conversations over a beer. “Although I had a knowledge and love for beer, I would often feel like the beer companies that I was purchasing beer from were not thinking of women as consumers of beer,” she says. Deciding to test this theory, she surveyed more than 200 women and found more than 70% of them felt underrepresented as beer drinkers. Digging further through the Brewers Association, she found the same number of women beer drinkers also felt they were not being marketed to. “I thought that this data was enough fuel for me to launch a business to change this mindset,” she relates. “In 2017, I left my very comfortable corporate job to set out to change the culture around women and beer.”

Sharing that her biggest challenge has been access to startup capital, encountering difficulty in finding a bank that would take her seriously, she recalls, “I finally found someone like me, an eager young woman who understood my vision and what I wanted to bring to the world.”

Greenwood launched her brewing company — solely woman-owned, with a female in the position of head brewer — with a goal to redefine beer for women. Fewer than 3% of breweries nationwide are woman-only owned, with more than 75% of brewing companies owned solely by men, and fewer than 4% have a female head brewer. “Our main goal is to be the preferred beer among women,” Greenwood says, “and we create our beer to make sure that women are feeling seen and celebrated as beer consumers.”