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‘Lounge brewery’ Policy Kings is in its ‘glow-up season’ after move from Cedar City to Salt Lake City

Co-owner Sara Ridgel said that by integrating hip-hop, blues, cocktails, events and beer, they’re “redefining what a brewery looks like and sounds like.”

(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Myles, Sara, Deandre and Alyvia Ridgel at Policy Kings, a new brewery in the Central Ninth neighborhood in Salt Lake City on Tuesday, July 8, 2025.

Since the “lounge brewery” Policy Kings moved from its birthplace in Cedar City to its new home in Salt Lake City, owners Deandre and Sara Ridgel say the business has been “reinventing” itself.

“In the beer world, we’re known,” said Deandre Ridgel of the craft brewery he and his wife started in 2018. But in Salt Lake City, where the brewery opened in May, he said, “we are having to re-create our identity again, because not a lot of people know us.”

“Everyone has their time in their life when they decide to have a glow up, and that’s what I feel, like we’re having our glow-up season,” Sara Ridgel said.

Located in the Central Ninth neighborhood, just east of West Temple at 79 W. 900 South, the brewery looks a lot different than the Ridgels’ first spot in Cedar City.

But Policy Kings didn’t just get a makeover. It has a new vibe, too.

“The best thing I love about up here, which we were not able to do in Cedar City, is we were not able to just fully be our culturally diverse self of a business,” Sara Ridgel said. “Because in Cedar, they don’t like that, they don’t want it.”

For a list of reasons that came with being a Black-owned brewery in rural Utah, the Ridgels said they’re ready to leave Cedar City behind them.

“We mentally have to move forward and to give what we need to give to make this space amazing, just like we made it amazing for our customers down there,” Sara Ridgel said.

Discovering the ‘policy kings’

(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Deandre and Sara Ridgel at Policy Kings, a new brewery in the Central Ninth neighborhood in Salt Lake City on Tuesday, July 8, 2025.

Sara Ridgel, who’s originally from Parowan, met Deandre Ridgel, who’s from the Midwest, almost 20 years ago in California. At the time, he was serving in the Navy in San Diego, and she was attending Southern Utah University in Cedar City.

When Deandre Ridgel got out of the military, Sara Ridgel asked him if he wanted to move to southern Utah, and he did. They got married in 2006 and now have two children.

Deandre Ridgel later took a job in IT in West Jordan. While he was living in Salt Lake County, before the rest of his family was able to make the move north, he had his first taste of craft beer, a 10% stout, when a friend took him to an Irish pub in Murray.

He said that stout is what “kickstarted” the idea to turn beer into a career.

In 2016, a few years after the family was able to move to West Jordan, Deandre Ridgel started home brewing beer, inviting people to come over and try his recipes, and researching how to start a brewery.

He “always wanted to just be his own boss,” his wife said. He was “never happy” in the corporate world, especially coming from the military, “being told what to do, being on a schedule all the time,” she said.

Plus, he wanted to have a venture lined up to leave their kids, “something to have and be proud of,” she said.

Finally, in January 2018, they sold their home in West Jordan and moved back to Cedar City the next month. They had the thought that as the home of Southern Utah University and the Shakespeare Festival, and with its proximity to national parks, Cedar City “would be a great place to start” a business, Sara Ridgel said.

In November 2018, they opened Policy Kings, inspired by a term Deandre Ridgel found online one night while he was looking for ideas for beer names.

“Policy kings” refers to Black men who ran an illegal gambling racket called the “numbers game,” aka “policy,” during the time of Prohibition.

“It was an immediate hit and quickly created a sprawling underground economy that moved through Harlem and other black communities in the U.S.,” The New York Times reported.

Policy was significant in Black communities because these “policy kings” would often take their winnings and reinvest them in their neighborhoods, Sara Ridgel said.

Deandre Ridgel said that even though the numbers game “was a negative aspect of being part of the mob, ‘policy kings’ still contributed to the community, they still created jobs, they still made themselves into the fabric of that community.”

“Those are the same traits that I wanted to carry into our business,” he continued, “not the negative part, but great jobs, giving back to the community, being an activist in my own way.”

Sara Ridgel said the story of their brewery is reflected in the history of the policy kings. “We literally, both times, created something out of nothing, from the ground up,” she said.

‘Cedar City is in our rearview’

(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) A glass of Kings Kolsch at Policy Kings, a new brewery in the Central Ninth neighborhood in Salt Lake City on Tuesday, July 8, 2025.

Soon after the Ridgels got settled in Cedar City, they started brewing, learning about craft beer as they went.

But they always planned to move back to Salt Lake City when the time was right, Sara Ridgel said.

In the meantime, they made the most out of living in Cedar City. She and her husband started a beer festival in southern Utah, launched a Juneteenth festival (“which was a struggle,” Sara Ridgel said), and held a forum about blackface after a video of a group of teenagers wearing blackface and black-and-white striped prisoner costumes in a Walmart went viral.

They also got their brewery through the pandemic, and logged more than 10,000 hours brewing beer, Deandre Ridgel said.

But their kids would get called names, Sara Ridgel said, “and people were just ignorant down there because they don’t like anything different.”

After a while, everything “culminated,” she said, “where it was like, ‘OK, it’s time for us to go to the second chapter of our business and our life.’”

The couple are proud of what they accomplished in Cedar City, and say they helped establish it as a “stopping point rather than a driving-through point,” Sara Ridgel said.

However, “we like to say Cedar City is in our rearview,” Deandre Ridgel said.

Establishing a ‘brewery lounge’

(Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) Customers sit at a table at Policy Kings Brewery in Salt Lake City on Thursday, May 29, 2025.

They started construction on the second iteration of Policy Kings in January. The structure in Central Ninth was built in the 1950s, and it was essentially “abandoned for a lot of years,” Sara Ridgel said.

They painted the walls. They painted, tinted and sealed the concrete floors twice. They built the bar top — with some help. Sara Ridgel scoured Facebook Marketplace daily for the perfect-size speakers to decorate the space beneath the bar.

And they leaned into one of their biggest inspirations — the many genres of music created by Black people — and commissioned a striking spray-painted mural by the artist Spray Kid that includes portraits of musical giants such as Louis Armstrong and Tupac Shakur.

(Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) Art is seen on the wall at Policy Kings Brewery in Salt Lake City on Thursday, May 29, 2025.

To create the color scheme for the rest of the bar, they drew visual inspiration from the cover of “N.W.A. & the Posse,” a compilation hip-hop album from 1987, with its stone-washed blacks, blues, bright yellows and many other colors.

They also discovered a beer community in Salt Lake City.

“You were on an island in southern Utah, you were alone,” she said. “So up here, we’re still alone in the minority way, but we’re not alone in having a [brewing] community that we can rely on and go and grab something from.”

Since Policy Kings’ brewing equipment isn’t set up yet, the Ridgels have been turning to fellow breweries to collaborate on beers with, use their facilities to maintain equipment, get kegs to tap at their own brewery, or use their equipment to brew on.

They credit Proper Brewing Co., Fisher Brewing, Chappell Brewing, Helper Beer, Bewilder Brewing Co. and Hopkins Brewing Company for helping them. They also brewed their own recipe, Kings Proper Kolsch — which is available on tap at Policy Kings — on Proper’s equipment.

Deandre Ridgel explained, however, that Policy Kings is more than just the beer it creates. “We are the space, and what we do inside of it is what we are, not the beer,” he said.

(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Policy Kings, a new brewery in the Central Ninth neighborhood in Salt Lake City, hosts a private party for the Salt Lake Film Club on Tuesday, July 8, 2025.

They describe their space as a “brewery lounge,” with a brewery and bar feel during the day, and more of a lounge feel at night with music and low lighting.

Sara Ridgel said that by integrating hip-hop, blues, cocktails, events and beer, they’re “redefining what a brewery looks like and sounds like.”

For example, gone is the Jenga set and foosball table that could be found in their Cedar City location. Now, there are domino sets and a selection of books, emphasizing their “grown and sexy” vibe, she said.

Policy Kings also hosts a variety of events, including themed vinyl nights on Mondays, trivia on Wednesdays, karaoke on Thursdays, DJ sets on Fridays, and live music on Saturdays. Policy Kings hosted its first art show in June, and on the last Saturday of each month, they do a musical tribute to a different artist. The next one, on July 26, is themed around Prince.

Sara Ridgel said they’re “giving everybody a cultural experience, no matter when you come in.”

Besides having a selection of local beer available, Policy Kings also has a full cocktail menu, made with fresh ingredients. The Queen — named for Stephanie St. Clair, a “policy queen” in Harlem in the early 20th century — is a gin-based cocktail with simple syrup and lemon juice and topped with a citrusy IPA on tap.

(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Quian Redfern mixes the music at Policy Kings, a new brewery in the Central Ninth neighborhood in Salt Lake City, as they host a private party for the Salt Lake Film Club on Tuesday, July 8, 2025.

As for future plans at Policy Kings, the Ridgels want to build a patio, get more artwork on the walls, and install bike racks, to accommodate cyclists on the 9 Line trail outside.

“We’re not just a brewery,” Deandre Ridgel said. “We feel like we’re a community space, a hub, a safe space, a space to gather.”

For updates on Policy Kings, follow the brewery on Instagram at @policykingsofficial.