Betsy Lay is the co-founder and owner of Lady Justice Brewing in Aurora, CO. She began her career working in education-based non-profits, including serving two terms as an AmeriCorps VISTA, where she met Kate Power and Jen Cuesta. Together in 2014, the three friends founded the philanthropic Lady Justice Brewing Company. She holds a certificate from the Siebel Institute of Technology's Concise Course in Brewing Technology and also earned a Master in Theological Studies from Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University. In her time off from the brewery, Betsy can be found with a good whiskey, a good book, and a good dog.
Instagram: @LadyJusticeBrewing
Twitter: @BetsyLay
Website: ladyjusticebrewing.com
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Betsy Lay is the co-founder and owner of Lady Justice Brewing in Aurora, CO. She began her career working in education-based non-profits, including serving two terms as an AmeriCorps VISTA, where she met Kate Power and Jen Cuesta. Together in 2014, the three friends founded the philanthropic Lady Justice Brewing Company. She holds a certificate from the Siebel Institute of Technology's Concise Course in Brewing Technology and also earned a Master in Theological Studies from Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University. In her time off from the brewery, Betsy can be found with a good whiskey, a good book, and a good dog.
Instagram: @LadyJusticeBrewing
Twitter: @BetsyLay
Website: ladyjusticebrewing.com
Follow FTE on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter for alerts on new episodes.
Ready to build your business like Lady J? Register for DO GOOD X's course Built for This. https://dogoodx.org/built-for-this
Rate, review, and subscribe to Sound of the Genuine on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Betsy Lay
Patrick: Betsy I'm so glad you joined us here on the Sound of the Genuine. How are you doing?
Betsy: I'm great. How are you?
Patrick: I'm doing okay. And I'm excited one, because I have an order that I'm gonna place as soon as we get off this call, so I can be your customer. And before we get to all that story, I'm actually curious about your origins. Where'd you start, where'd you grow up? Like who are your people? Where did all this dreaming begin?
Betsy: I grew up in St. Louis in a pretty progressive family. My mom and dad are very progressive folks and my grandparents on my dad's side are, were much more conservative, but not conservative like we talk about today. You know but like politics and activism wasn't anything we discussed at the Lay family Thanksgiving. But my mom's side, the Hamras, Lebanese family, big Lebanese, stubborn Arab family that was really dedicated to social justice issues and activism in that way. And so that's sort of where a lot of the seeds were planted is just watching my family, on a regular basis, you know, protest and travel.
And my meemaw probably still to this day writes angry letters to the editor, you know? So, just sitting there and letting the world happen to you is not something that my mom's family allow us for. Yeah, so I grew up in St. Louis and grew up in the United Methodist church and actually really enjoyed that, had a lot of good friends. We had a strong family and youth program there. So that was a really central part of my growing up and upbringing. Outside of that, went to a small, smaller high school that was in the city. We had less than 200 kids in my high school class.
So, just being in a community where people knew each other and actually for the most part, kind of liked each other, it was this weird… It was weird. I don't think my high school experience was similar to a lot of other people's. Yeah, I grew up around strong communities of people that I actually really enjoyed and learned a lot from.
When I really think back on how I ended up at Lady Justice, you know, I never wanted to be a business owner and I never thought I would be a brewer or anything like that. And so I'm like, how the hell did I get there? I think the seeds were actually planted pretty early on for me in terms of social enterprise.
My mom is a lawyer and she's had her own law firm since I was a kid. And I didn't realize that until growing up that like, actually my mom was a small business owner and ran her own show for almost my whole life. And it wasn't until I grew up and started my own business where I actually really started thinking about that on those terms. Cause you know, when you're a kid, like your mom just goes to work, right? I didn't think it was that impressive, but actually now that I'm an adult, I can look back on it. And I was like, holy crap. Like she was a woman in a male dominated industry who became really highly respected and ran her own business for like 25, 30 years.
Patrick: I'm seeing some strong themes already. I mean, you mentioned your Meemaw, your mom, strong women who are doing this. I mean, what were their hopes for you growing up in St. Louis? How would you answer that question? When I grow up, I want to do, or I want to be, or??
Betsy: My thing is, and I think this is partly why I ended up with Lady Justice, is I never knew what I wanted to be. For a little while I was going to be the very first woman baseball player in the major leagues. And then my mom told me once how much anesthesiologists make, so I wanted to be an anesthesiologist for a while because they made a crap ton of money.
And so I floated around for a long time but the expectation was always like, you're going to go to college. Of course you're going to go to college. And of course you're going to have a job and you'll end up, you know, with your own house. So like the typical steps that were available to kids growing up in the suburbs, were the same expectations that were held on me.
But I think there was always an expectation as well that no matter what you do, you need to be in service to people and in service to your community. And so maybe that's why I floated around so much is that there aren't a whole lot of jobs where it's like, service oriented that you can also feed yourself with.
But I have a lot of teachers in my family. My dad was a chemistry and physics teacher for 30 years. He still adjuncts at the college level. My grandparents, my aunts, uncles, tons of teachers in my family. So I saw a lot of that growing up too. Not necessarily an ambition to be rich but more of an ambition to take care of what you need to take care of your household, and then make sure that you're helping your community.
Patrick: So if you have this strong community, strong family community high school, where people really like each other, and this does sound awesome, and you're thinking about your next steps, going to say college, were you looking at like, I need to find an undergraduate programs that’s got a great anesthesiology program and a great baseball program? Like what were you looking at? Where'd you end up? Yeah. What'd you end up doing?
Betsy: I thought for a little while I would do music. I was a saxophone player so I was in the jazz band in high school and really loved it, but I was not disciplined enough in any way, shape, or form to go to music school. The direction that I ended up going was digital media. I graduated from high school in 2000 and so digital media was brand new and the reason that I liked it, that I thought I could do it is my dad always had cool computers and cool cameras and he ran a little production company, a media company for a little while.
So I always enjoyed that stuff. And that was stuff that came pretty easily to me, audio visual design and then some graphic design. There are two schools in the country the year 2000 that had digital media as a program. One of them was Bradley university, which was in Peoria, Illinois – five-hour drive from my house. And my mom really wanted me to go there. Because she wanted me to stay closer to home.
Her rule was like, you can go anywhere you want, do whatever you want, but like, can you just be like a six-hour drive from home? And I was like, okay. And then the University of Denver had the very first digital media program in the country. It was five years old in the year 2000. I got into both schools and ended up going to DU so a 12 hour drive instead of a six-hour drive. But once my mom understood that I would probably do better in Denver than in Peoria, Illinois, she was cool with it. That was in 2000 and I'm still here. I left for a little while, but I'm back. I'm still, I'm still here. Yeah.
Patrick: Out of St. Louis, what was going to Denver like? I mean, were you finding that sense of community and the people that you had growing up?
Betsy: Because church and music were the two places where I found community growing up, I looked for that in Denver and accidentally stumbled across like more conservative evangelical groups, not totally understanding what they were and what was going on. So I actually ended up making friends with a lot of people who were just completely different than me and had totally different views of the world and of theology and religion and church.
And I really like struggled with...not with them as people, I really liked them as people, but then like we would get in these conversations about all sorts of stuff. And I'm like, how the hell do you believe this? Like, how do you, how do you actually like, believe this as a Christian? And so I accidentally became friends with conservative Christians. I didn't mean to, it just sort of happened, but I did find a good community with those folks. You know, it was just an understanding that I probably disagreed with them on almost everything. But I'm still friends with some of those people today. So my community was more centered around, not necessarily around church because I didn't go to church that much in college, but it was centered around a Christian community for the most part. And then by the end of graduation, I was just like so opposed to the theology that was coming out of those communities, I just really couldn't do it anymore. The ideas around service and around service to your community was there, we just approached it differently.
Patrick: And what'd you do post-graduation. I mean what's the next step after that?
Betsy: The next step, I went and moved to the mountains for a season and worked at a lodge. It was actually owned by Young Life. You know, they have all these properties, these like camp properties and stuff, and this was like their family camp. And so me and six or seven other, like we were all 20, 22 years old, something like that, lived together in a little house in the mountains on this ranch and we were glorified janitors for about four months. Yeah, so I did that and that was great, that was really fun. It was a nice little escape from reality for a little while after college. And then that internship ended in November of that year and I moved back to St. Louis for a little bit to try to figure out what I was going to do next and moved into my mom's basement. I get along wonderfully with my family and it's never really been contentious. We've always gotten along, but at some point I was like, I just don't want to live here anymore.
So I found a small apartment in St. Louis and actually for a little while I was working at my mom's law office just to make some money. And then, somehow found myself being the youth director at the church I grew up at. I spent two years running the youth program there. It was a fun job but it was very challenging, because it's hard to be in a position of authority in a place where like they used to like, change your diapers, you know? But it was, it was cool, it was fun. My little brother was in the youth group for a couple of years when I was running it.
While I was there, there were four pastors on staff at that church and three of them had gone to Perkins-SMU for seminary and one of them had been in St. Louis at Eden and all four of them were like, you need to go to seminary.
And I was like, okay. I never wanted to be a pastor I don't think? At that point I was not out, but I knew that I was gay and I knew that that was not going to fly in the Methodist church in Missouri. And so I didn't really know what I was going to do with my life, but I was like, yeah sure I'll go to grad school. I'm not going to work at my mom's law office forever. I don't want to work in this church forever. So, yeah, I spent two years in St. Louis and then moved to Dallas. I went down there originally to do a master's in church ministry was a program they had, and ended up switching to an MTS and going that route because it only took two years, so it cost less money.
Patrick: So you get this MTS. So now you got this credential, you been pastoring, I mean, it sounds like just searching or maybe just letting life happen? What comes after cause like an MTS, that's not like a fun degree. Like people don't go like, hey how do I just like do some church history and Hebrew Bible. Let me just throw all these things together
Betsy: Loved it. That is my jam. If I can just sit in a room and research theology all day long, holy crap, I would love it. And like, why didn't you get your PhD, Betsy? Well, like every PhD I know it's like, they either hate their jobs or they don't have one. So I was like, I'm not going to get a PhD, but no, I loved doing an MTS.
I went to Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University. I had the best time there. Talk about community again, whatever the magic was that they did in their admissions program that year, we were like just immediately a very tight cohort of people who really cared about each other a lot.
But when I graduated again, yeah, I was like, I don't know what I'm going to do with this degree.
I mean, obviously I wasn't going to be a pastor. I didn't get an M.Div. I didn't go through the ordination route. I had had enough bad experiences being gay in the United Methodist Church in Missouri that I just didn't want to go there.
But I still liked the church at that point. And so, not really knowing what I was going to do, I went and started looking for jobs in Denver again and stumbled across this job opportunity to work at a nonprofit via AmeriCorps. I applied for that and got hired there and so I moved to Denver in 2009. When you're in AmeriCorps, there's a couple of different programs that you can do and so I was a Vista, which is Volunteer in Service to America. The whole idea is that you're paid the poverty level at the city in which you serve and you do capacity building for a nonprofit. So yeah, I spent two years doing that. It was funny my mom was like, how much money do you make? And you just got a master's degree? So, yeah, I was making $10,000 a year because that was the poverty level in Denver in 2009. Again, amazing community of people. There were five vistas that worked in that office together.
And we're still all best friends and still are very much involved in each other's lives to this day. The work was hard and I would never ever do that job again. I think everybody should do AmeriCorps by the way. I think it's a good way to serve your community and your country in a different way. I feel very fortunate that my experience in AmeriCorps led me to the community that I have today.
Patrick: And now you're back in Denver through this AmeriCorps experience…I mean, is this where, I don't know, I was going to say the seeds, you know I say this with other guests - seeds, but I guess with you it'd be hops. Is this where some of that stuff started to ferment?
Betsy: Hops, hops are a flower, they start as seeds.. So you can go and seed. Yeah, so this was it. In AmeriCorps, I met Jen Questa and Kate Power, they were two of the five people that we were assigned to this nonprofit with. And Denver in 2009-2010, was just a touch ahead of the craft beer scene that the rest of the country hadn't really had yet.
But there had been really good craft beer in Denver for about 30 years at that point, 30-40 years. So yeah going and getting a beer at a brewery was normal everyday life in Denver in 2010. When we could afford it, we would scrap together some money and go to this brew pub and drink beer and eat and just like, kind of have a good time.
And there's no money anywhere being a fundraiser during a recession is really awful, awful work. And so we would go and grab beers after work and just commiserate about all of this. And at some point we think it was, Jen was just sort of like, what I don't understand is like we're on food stamps right now. We're at the poverty line, but we made it a priority to gather over beer and food together and this place is always packed. So like we're in the middle of recession and everybody here is choosing to drink beer instead of saving their money for something else.
Like what is that about and why can't we just take our beer money and fund this nonprofit? And it was just sort of like, that was it. And it was just honestly, just this tipsy little conversation and we went on with our lives after that. But it really stuck with Kate, this idea of, somehow funneling money from a brewery and using it to fund non-profits. And so she really stuck with it. And when we were done with AmeriCorps in 2011, Kate and Jen both left the state to go to law school. And I stuck around Denver and I went back to church work cause that's what I knew.
And I direct directed family and youth programming at a Methodist church in Boulder for three and a half-four years. So during that time Kate's developing this sort of idea of a business plan, because she's in law school and has to do some business law stuff and needed to build a business plan for a class that she was in.
And so she started working on this and getting feedback about what does it look like to build a brewery that is philanthropic? I was living in Denver and working in Boulder. While we were in AmeriCorps somebody else from a different AmeriCorps branch came and worked with us for a few weeks and, that's Alison who ended up being my wife. And so Alison and I were making our home in Denver and trying to figure out what came next for both of us, because two people coming out of AmeriCorps, you know, we didn't have any money, we didn't have anything.
So I was working for a really progressive church in Boulder and learning a lot about what it means to be a white, progressive person in a city like Boulder and what progress actually means to that community and what community actually means to that community.
And then at some point they were just running out of money and had to cut down a lot of programming. So I got laid off from that job in 2014 and Jen and Kate graduated from law school in 2014 and they came back to Denver. And so we were all in Denver without any jobs and not really sure what to do. So while we looked for jobs, we built Lady Justice; built up that concept and built a business plan and started brewing together again.
Patrick: So as you start brewing, I mean, I'm hearing like the community piece, the thread going through this, back to these friends, your partner, your wife, all gathering together back in Denver. Now 2014, I want everyone so that they hear this right. Like you start brewing together. It's not like lady justice in 2014, you say, all right, we got a brewery and everyone across the country starts ordering from your website immediately. Tell us a little bit about like, what does that mean to start something and say, okay we're going to try to do this?
Betsy: Yeah. For Lady J it looked very different, I think, than it looks for a lot of people. We intentionally made very calculated risks and took a lot of baby steps because there was not a good set example of a social enterprise brewery in 2014.
And so we were doing something that was actually kind of new. We did not have backgrounds in business or in brewing. We didn't know what the hell we were doing. We had no idea. First step for us with building a business plan and really figuring out what this could be and simultaneously also figuring out if it was legal. There's a lot of weird laws around alcohol and what you can and can't do, and where you can and can't sell it and how to make that happen. And you can't have a 501c3 that profits off of alcohol sales. The federal government really wants tax revenue from booze.
And so we're like, how do we start? How do we even like give money away? You know, like, how do we do this work if we're not a nonprofit? And so we were really just learning about what it means to be a for-profit business that gives all its money away. So we were trying to figure that out and we were building a business plan and we were trying to figure out how to fundraise it.
And at the same time we were home brewing together. We had all dabbled in home brewing. We all knew beer pretty well. Just being in Denver it's hard not to be exposed to the craft beer scene. If you want to be exposed to it, it is around literally every corner. So we knew beer and we knew how to drink it.
We were brewing together all the time and trying to get some recipes dialed in to have. We wanted to have a really, really good product. And so that was 2014 and then in 2015, we finally felt like we were ready to launch our fundraiser. And we did not want to put ourselves into debt for this, because again, we didn't know if it was going to work and we didn't really have any money anyway. Like two unemployed lawyers and one unemployed church worker does not equal a business loan. So we were also trying to figure out how do we raise money for this in a way that gets us to where we need to be, but is also money that we feel like people will trust us with, you know?
And so, we launched a crowdsource campaign via Indiegogo and we figured out that we only needed $20,000 to get a few months rent on a space, buy a one and a half barrel brew system and some fermenters. And so we could do this really, really small if we didn't build a taproom.
So if we just only had a production space and distributed our beer out of there we could do this very cheaply. We gathered together a group of our friends, we gave them some of our beer, and we just said like, hey you've been listening to us talk about this over the last year. You've been trying out these brews with us and giving us feedback.
Now we actually want to do this and we want to launch this thing and we want it to work. We didn't ask any of them to give us money. What we asked them to do was to spread the word and share the campaign. Alison, she did social media as a profession for 10 years so she knew what she was doing. So she set up a whole schedule of when to post about it and what to say so that we could beat the algorithm and all of that stuff. And we launched our Indiegogo campaign. Our goal on Indiegogo is $15,000 and we raised that in eight days and then we raised the rest of it over the rest of the month.
So we ended up with the 20K that we needed to. And then, because it was a crowdsourcing campaign, we ended up with about a hundred, 150 people who had given money to us and so we had this new audience. Some of it was friends and family, but some of it was like complete strangers. And so we are learning through this fundraising that this idea was going to resonate with people.
Like, we really didn't know if this was going to work or not, but it started feeling like, oh, this is going to work. People do care about us. So that's how we got started. Very, very small and scrappy.
Patrick: And I know you weren't doing just this. It sounds like you got this great thing. What were you doing alongside this as you're building Lady Justice?
Betsy: So eventually all three of us got jobs. Alison, my wife, had just graduated from Iliff School of Theology. When you graduate from AmeriCorps, you can choose a cash reward. Like they have an award that you get at the end for doing it, I guess?
Or you can choose educational award money. And so I was like, why would I take free money and use it to pay off my grad school loans when I could just keep going to school? I actually took some classes at Iliff School of Theology just because I could. It was free so I was like, why not?
I did that for a couple of quarters till that education award money ran out and then I dropped out of Iliff but my wife had started a program at Iliff right when I was dropping out and she ended up sticking around there and worked there. And she was walking by the Dean's office one day. Albert Hernandez is the Dean at the time and she overheard him say like my admin assistant disappeared and I need somebody temporarily to fill in for this office. And so she like popped her head and she was like, Albert, my wife really needs a job right now. She just lost her job at a church. I think she'd be really good here. I went and interviewed with Albert at Iliff. We sat there for like, I don't know, an hour and a half-two hours and just like nerded out over medieval Spanish history. Cause that's what his specialty is in.
And I had gone to Spain during grad school to learn about the golden age of Spain and medieval Spanish history so we just hit it off. So I started at Iliff just as a temporary job and then it moved into a full-time position and it evolved in a lot of different ways, but that was where I was in 2014-2015.
So eventually Kate and Jen and I all had jobs. And so we were also balancing this with full-time work. And so this was very much a night and weekend sort of deal with Lady J. I would wake up before I would go to work and work on lady J's stuff from like 6:00 a.m. until eight or nine o'clock in the morning before going to Iliff and did that for a few years.
Patrick: And when do you start thinking, Lady Justice has got a thing? And I also want to position, if you can, position Lady Justice for us in the craft brewery scene, because I don't think a lot of listeners will have a context for that, but my sense of it everywhere else in the country, maybe it's different in Denver, but my sense of it, it's a dude-man-bro-yo scene. Tell us a little bit about Lady J too.
Betsy: Beer is predominantly white and male, the beer culture and industry, or at least that's the impression that the beer industry wants you to believe. That it's just a bunch of burly white dudes with beards who make and drink beer.
Like we ran into people not really believing that we were going to be able to do this or that we knew how to brew or anything, because we were women. So we were setting all of this up against a scene that in Denver was actually pretty friendly and a little bit more accessible than I think other places. And again, you have to remember, the craft beer scene that we know today is very young. Craft beer has kind of been around since about, the seventies is when historians kind of mark it, when Jimmy Carter's homebrew law went into effect.
Craft beer as we know it today is really only four or five years old. So we were coming into this pretty early in terms of that. So we are running into people, not really understanding, women running breweries, and that's still a thing that doesn't really happen. The numbers on that are sad. We had that going in and then this idea that we weren't going to have a taproom really, really confused people.
They were like, well, how do I get your beer? And that was something we had to figure out. You know our brew space is 300 square feet. We couldn't fit in a taproom. And so we had to get creative about how to get our beer out to people. So when we were in AmeriCorps, we used to split farm shares. So we would all go in together and buy a share into somebody's community garden or their farm and then you would get the produce from that. So that's how we got cheap, healthy produce in AmeriCorps.
So we were like, what if we stole that idea - community supported agriculture model? So we started with a membership model, you'd pay your membership upfront so that we had all the money we needed right away to make this beer. And that membership gets you beer once a month. We don't like to be exclusive, but by default we had to be because we could only brew so much beer. And then we knew how much our overhead was, which was pretty cheap because we didn't pay ourselves. And rent was cheap and ingredients are fairly accessible in Denver.
And so, we knew right away how much money we had left over to donate back though the non-profits. So we were able to control our production and our schedule really, really well in those first few years. Like our first round we had 75 members and then it grew eventually up to about 125 members, which was our max. That was almost probably too many people at that point so we maxed out at about 125 people.
Our customer base from day one was not typical, was not a typical craft beer customer base. It was people who wanted the experience of having exclusive craft beer that nobody else in the world was going to have access to. So there’s these like Uber beer nerds who are like really fascinated with this idea of like true small batch I made this beer for you. The other people that bought memberships were people who were really into this social enterprise, philanthropic model. They were like, oh you're a brewery that gives back? Like, I like beer. I like giving back to my community, this is awesome, I want to be a part of this community.
And then the third one was women who specifically sought us out because we were women brewing and they wanted to check out what this was all about. And all of these people were people who loved beer and were familiar with the Denver craft scene. But you talk about when you walk into a space, do the people there look like you and do they reflect your values? And, so we became a space where that was true for our customers and so that's something that was part of our foundation and I think has sort of stuck with us as we've grown.
Patrick: That's amazing. And I got one last question for you as I think about this narrative arc that you've given us, and I'm going back to your grandmother, to Meemaw and your mom, and having this high school experience again, that I'm jealous of, like it sounds like you had a great community and what you're doing now with Lady Justice, where the people have a community where they see and feel like it's reflected there.
I mean, I'm going back to this, almost your AmeriCorps experience. You talked about gathering. We still are choosing to gather together as a community over this thing. And in this case, it's beer I'm of course informed by all this, the way you're doing community, I'm sure with your ministries and all that, but how much of like your imagination about Lady Justice, about what you do in the world, how you're going to spend your time now, working on Lady Justice is informed by that sense of community about gathering around something? How much is kind of internal to like that SMU nerd that wants to go and just hang out in a cool library?
Betsy: I think it dominates a lot of it to be quite honest. I talk about sometimes how beer is a liquid form of breaking bread with people. Quite literally, it's alcoholic liquid bread is what beer is. The historical implications that that has. I think we're connected as just human species.
We lived off of beer for the first, like 10,000 years of civilization before there was clean water. Beer was a safe form of food and drink for people. And so I think we have this like connection to our ancestors in a way that we don't necessarily understand because industrial revolution and clean water, which, you know, both have good things to them.
But I think we lost our connection with why these things are important to us today. Right? We have clean water now and we have better access to food and so now we can drink beer at kind of like, just for fun or as a way to gather. I think there's something connected there we just don't see it all the time.
And so when I think about our communities that we've built around Lady Justice, like absolutely see it as being an extension of, just as humans, us wanting to find ways to be with each other and connect with each other. The work that we're doing and being connected to our mission and how our community is completely tied to our mission and how those things always have to be intertwined with each other for us to be truly living out our mission, I think about that all the time.
My history of always seeming to find myself in really good communities with people, and really productive communities of people. And then having this theological background and this theological understanding of like…society is basically just a bunch of people trying to figure out like what in the world is going on, you know?
That's all we're doing. And so, being able to connect that with beer is really cool. I would love to see that aspect. Today is my last day working at Iliff School of Theology and I'll move into Lady Justice full-time. We have a taproom now, we have a larger production, you know, we keep growing and so as Lady Justice continues to evolve and grow, I will absolutely keep paying attention to these connections that I've had. I think there's a lot of theology behind what we do at Lady J even though that's not our mission. Kate and Jen don't have theological backgrounds or necessarily religious backgrounds but you know, they're spiritual in their own way.
But I think this idea of community and connection and beer are always going to be central to lady J's mission. I just have to find other ways to talk about it that don't put people to sleep, you know, and like not everybody wants to hear the nerdy beer history behind what they're drinking so, you know, we try to make it fun.
Patrick: That's awesome. I mean, I'm so excited about it. If people want to find out more about Lady J, where to get it, where would they go for more information and also just to find out more about how you've thought about the social enterprise model as like that way of brewing beer to give back.
Betsy: Following our social media accounts is the best way to do it, Instagram and Facebook, both @ladyjusticebrewing. And then our website has our history and all sorts of info like that, which is ladyjusticebrewing.com. If you're in the Denver area our taproom is in Aurora, you can come see us in person. We do ship to nine or ten states and that's all dependent on the law of the state that you live in. So we can ship to the places where we can legally ship to for free, without having to get permits and licensing and all that. So that's all on our website too.
And then this idea of social enterprise and beer and all of that is starting to become a little bit more of a focus. So I'm actually teaching at Iliff in the fall precisely on this. And teaching students the idea is that they will have a business plan for a social enterprise, whether it's real or fake, but you know, they're going to go through the steps of learning how to start one and the nitty gritty details.
Speaking with Boyung, who's the Dean at Iliff and who connected us, I'm hopeful that this can grow into a more outside community sort of program. So keep your eyes out on Iliff over the next few years too. Cause I think there's really something special here.
Especially people who don't want to be in traditional ministry or can't be in traditional ministry and are struggling to find what to do. I think social enterprise can be an answer for that. And so I anticipate working with Iliff on this for actually a really long time and figuring out how do we develop this for folks who aren't full-time students at Iliff.
Patrick: That's exciting. I mean, I'm seeing down into the future, the AI lab brewing beer at Iliff, building a social enterprise that does good in the world so that way we can spend more time sitting around the table building community.
Betsy: Yeah. We'll let Justin and Michael and Ted at Iliff build some like beer robot that can, brew and yeah.
Patrick: Well, thank you so much for being on the sound of the genuine Betsy. I just have appreciated it. I'm inspired by the story. I'm grateful that you're doing this. I cannot wait to taste this and come and visit you. I've been talking to Boyung [about] coming up to Denver, so I will be coming to see you in person whenever that's safe. I mean, this has just been a gift. What you're doing in the world matters and I'm sincerely grateful for this conversation.
Betsy: Yeah thanks! This was fun.