The Smooth Sip of Success

Pals Manny Chao and Roger Bialous made Georgetown Brewing a Seattle favorite

By Derek Belt

When Manuel “Manny” Chao, ’94, walks into a bar in Seattle’s historic Georgetown neighborhood, he is instantly recognized by the staff and many of the patrons. “Hey Manny!” they all say as he waves hello and happily sits down at the corner of the bar, where I join him a few moments later.

“The corner is my favorite spot,” he says, settling in. “It’s where you get the best service, it’s where the action is, and because you can actually have a conversation with somebody.”

For Chao, the son of Chinese and Taiwanese immigrants whose parents made their way in America as restaurant owners, conversations are currency. He’s in the relationship business, after all, having started his career selling craft beer to local hotspots as the first employee of Redmond’s Mac and Jack’s Brewery. Now, he is thriving as co-founder of Georgetown Brewing Co.—the largest independent brewery in Washington and maker of Pacific Northwest favorites Manny’s Pale Ale, Roger’s Pilsner, Bodhizafa IPA and Johnny Utah Pale Ale.

“When I was a kid, I liked hanging out at the restaurant, so for me there was always an appeal to being a small-business owner,” says Chao, who fell in love with craft beer in college and hosted tastings for his Zeta Psi fraternity brothers. At the UW’s Foster School of Business, Chao famously persuaded many classmates to do group projects on breweries. Incorporated in 2002 after Chao left Mac and Jack’s, Georgetown was the largest draft-only brewery in the country until 2017, after which it began canning some of its most popular brews. Now distributed in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Japan, Georgetown was named “Seattle’s Favorite Brewery” by The Seattle Times in 2019.

Manny’s Pale Ale alone is sold in more than 900 bars and restaurants in the Seattle area. When the bartender asks me what I want, I can’t resist drinking his namesake beer with the man himself: “I’ll have a Manny’s.” It’s darn tasty beer, as the company’s tagline goes.

Chao’s longtime business partner and co-founder at Georgetown Brewing is Roger Bialous—of Roger’s Pilsner fame.

Bialous earned a Master of Health Administration from UW in 2000 and worked in health-care insurance before teaming up with Chao to play a pivotal role in Seattle’s craft beer revolution.

“We’ve been in business together for 20 years, and I still consider him one of my best friends,” says Chao, recalling how the two met through mutual friends and started playing Ultimate Frisbee together.

“Very early on, we had this rule where if we ever started arguing about something, we’d stop and go get a beer.”

When Bialous joins us, I ask what he has ordered so I can see what real beer guys are having these days. He raises his glass and shrugs: “I got a Roger’s.” Chao laughs joyously and adds with a wide grin: “We drink everything.” Their buddy cop routine is legendary.

“I always try to treat myself as a consumer and drink our beers to compare them against other beers,” says Chao, who handles production, marketing, retail and sales for Georgetown, while Bialous manages financing, accounting and human resources. “You have to be able to sell to yourself. Like, what are you drinking? What are your friends drinking? As a brewer, you constantly have to do that—it never stops.”

As for having a beer named after you?

“That part’s crazy for us—to think we’ve made iconic brands,” says Chao, to which Bialous adds: “It’s a lot less weird than it was when we first had beers named after us. At the time, we weren’t creative enough to come up with something better.”

Creativity hasn’t been an issue for Georgetown of late. Bodhizafa, still Chao’s favorite beer and the gold medal winner in the American Style IPA category at the 2016 Great American Beer Festival. It is the company’s fastest-growing beer along with Johnny Utah Pale Ale, another award winner. Both are named after characters in “Point Break,” the 1991 action flick starring Patrick Swayze as Bodhizafa, a long-haired, bank-robbing surfer, and Keanu Reeves as Johnny Utah, the cleancut undercover FBI agent who infiltrates Bodhi’s gang.

“There’s a lot of dogs named Bodhi now. There’s a lot of sons named Bodhi. It’s pretty funny,” says Chao. “We wrote this

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