Daily Inspiration: Meet Mahalia Witter-Merithew

Today we’d like to introduce you to Mahalia Witter-Merithew.

Hi Mahalia, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstories.
I was born in the Philippines in 1982. My family moved to Tampa, Florida in 1984. Then we moved to Wilson, North Carolina in 1988. I consider this my hometown even though I felt like an outsider growing up here.

I started working in the beer industry in NC by chance in 2003. I had just graduated with a degree in Creative Writing and was saving money for grad school, so I took a job through a temp agency that placed me as the interim office manager at a beer distributor.

In 2007, I met my husband. I was just finishing up grad school, and he had just taken his first job as a professional brewer at Duck-Rabbit in Farmville. We spent most of our dating years representing Duck-Rabbit at beer festivals.

In 2009, we got married, and shortly thereafter, Ryan was offered the opportunity of a lifetime to be a head brewer at a small brewery in Denmark. We spent three and a half years living in a brewery in Denmark on a charming island with cobblestone streets and thatched rooves. We left Denmark because you can’t stay for longer than 4 years if you haven’t mastered the language, and also we had been presented with an opportunity to help start a brewery in England, and it had always been a dream of mine to live there.

We lived in England for two years, and it wasn’t a dream. We had a hard time finding a sense of community in our area, and then I was diagnosed with cancer. The NHS saved my life, and we moved back to America shortly after I finished treatment because I wanted to be closer to family and to be in a country where it was easier for me to understand the way society worked.

We ended up moving to Vermont to a tiny town that felt like home, but we were not “Vermont Tough” enough to commit to making it through a third winter after our second winter lasted nine months.

In Vermont, we started Casita. My husband’s boss had offered him the opportunity to start his own brand as a way to earn extra money. My husband didn’t want to do it because he didn’t know anything about running a business, but I knew how much the opportunity to have that creative outlet would mean to him, so I started the business for him.

I started Casita in 2015, not too long after having my last surgery as a result of my breast cancer. It was a painful, invasive surgery with a long recovery time, so I had a lot of time to think. One of the first beers we brewed was a beer called Querido y Perdido (Loved and Lost), which was dedicated to the women in my breast cancer support group who did not survive cancer. There is a lot of survivor’s guilt that goes along with being part of a group that everyone does not get to graduate from.

It made me question why I was alive and not those other women, and I still can’t answer that question, but what I resolved to do with my bonus life was to help other people. That first year, we were able to raise $14,000 for the Breast Cancer Research Foundation in memory of those we have loved and lost, and we have continued to brew it every year. We moved our business to my hometown of Wilson, NC in 2017. It came full circle because we started contract brewing out of Duck-Rabbit which was where Ryan got his start as a brewer.

In 2020, the pandemic created the opportunity for us to move into an already existing brewery space in Wilson, and we have been here ever since. For me, my vision of a brewery had always been a community watering hole where EVERYONE could feel at home. I had lived in Wilson for my entire childhood and then three years as an adult, and I never felt the sense of community that I feel when I’m in this place. That part feels like a dream come true.

I also knew that I wanted our business to be a driving force for good. I believe in ethical capitalism, which means fair wages for employees, an eye on sustainability, and being community-focused. Every month, we partner with a different non-profit to help them fundraise and also give them a place to engage with the public in a different way. We have donated $33,125 to various nonprofits in our local community, as well as supporting community initiatives like free rides to the polls.

We have also continued to fundraise for the Breast Cancer Research Foundation and have helped to raise over $50,000 for that organization in the six years we have brewed Querido. My husband and I are very proud of our little business and excited to welcome everyone to Casita.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
When I see this question, I think of Shakespeare, “The course of true love never did run smooth.” How you know you really love something is you keep going even though it’s hard.

The beer industry is a hard industry to be a woman in because women have long been objectified by marketing in the beer industry and many other industries. It is a boys’ club in a lot of ways, which means if you are a woman in the beer industry, especially one who has been in it for going on 20 years, you will probably have experienced some terrible, disgusting, unsafe, and disrespectful things.

This is why I presented the Safer Workspaces Initiative at the NC Craft Brewers Conference this year and sat on a panel to talk about D, E, & I in the beer industry. The Safer Workspaces Initiative is a pledge and a resource guide I created for people in the beer industry. It is a baby step for beer businesses to go from doing nothing to taking steps in the right direction to educate themselves and their staff so that we can create a safer beer industry. There are many programs like this that exist, but this one is free, which is important for small business owners.

I also created a beer called Increasing Visibility which was a response to two separate experiences I had being interviewed by myself by men, who after the interview, chose to focus their articles on my husband, in one case completely writing me out of the story of our business altogether. That plus the fact, I am the president of this company, and everyone always came in here looking right past me for my manager was about to drive me crazy because I work too hard to have my contributions minimized. We brewed this beer in 2021, and this year, I brewed a different version to increase the visibility of another woman in the beer industry–Sarah Real from Hot Plate Brewing. I plan to make this a yearly project.

In general, small business ownership is hard. It is hard to find balance. Also as a mother, I feel like people always tend to blame moms for parenting shortcomings, which is unfair because there are two parents, but people don’t hold dads to the same standards as moms. I struggle to find work/life balance, but I’m hopeful that as our business becomes more established, it won’t be so all-encompassing.

Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I stopped studying Art in 6th grade because they made me choose between Art and Chorus and Chorus had better trips. I did take one class on Elements of Art as an undergrad, but aside from that, I pretty much stopped developing as an artist in 6th grade even though I always loved art.

Starting Casita allowed me to restart my development as an artist because it created the opportunity for me to start drawing again. I have hand-drawn almost every single beer label for Casita since we started, although we occasionally feature guest artists.

Part of my initiatives to involve the community at Casita is two arts initiatives. One is public art at its most ambitious. We have been attempting to break the Guinness World Record for the most different people to participate in a paint-by-numbers mural. It has been slow going in a town like Wilson, but I’ve loved watching it slowly come to life.

It’s a cellular piece based on the label art from a beer we made called “The Inevitability of Change”, and it features two words ‘Grow’ and ‘Change’, which are my wishes for every person and also our community in Historic Downtown Wilson. I hope everyone feels open and ready to grow and change.

We also have a series called taproom masterpieces where different artists come and paint a barrel at Casita. We have had over thirty artists paint a barrel so far and this project will continue for the life of our taproom because the barrels are live barrels full of beer and constantly rotate out as we package them. I love how each barrel represents someone’s unique perspective.

Where we are in life is often partly because of others. Who/what else deserves credit for how your story turned out?
My husband is the brewer. He is so talented. There would certainly be no brewery without him. We always tell people he makes the beer and I make the Casita. We support each other, and we are only able to do this through teamwork.

Once upon a time, the building Casita Brewing Company is in was like a used mule dealership/parking garage. After moving into the building, I learned that the family who used to own it had a wedding toast about the importance of a couple being like a pair of well-matched mules. It’s not very romantic, but it’s earnest, and it’s so fitting for Ryan Witter-Merithew and me. Every day, we work side-by-side, plowing and sowing the seeds of our future. People who romanticize small business owners don’t realize that it’s never-ending work, but as our relationship, it’s a labor of love.

My mom helps babysit our daughter. We could not make this business work without her.

Ryan’s mom and sister helped us financially when we started our business with a $5000 Kickstarter in 2015, and most recently they helped sponsor the first major beer festival that we’re hosting here in May called Casita Collab Fest. It is a festival dedicated to friendship and camaraderie in the beer industry.

And of course, we could not make this work without our amazing staff and also our most loyal accounts.

Pricing:

• $100 VIP ticket to Casita Collab Fest available at https://casitabrews.oznr.com/
• $50 General Admission Ticket to Casita Collab Fest available at https://casitabrews.oznr.com/
• $20 Designated Driver Ticket to Casita Collab festival available at https://casitabrews.oznr.com/

Contact Info:

• Email: [email protected]
• Website: https://casitabrews.com/
• Instagram: @casitabrews
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CasitaBrews
• Twitter: @casitabrews