Former UConn star Tina Charles took a look at her past as she carved out her future.
Charles, who retired prior to the 2026 WNBA season, is the founder of 78 Brewing Co., a beer enterprise in which she has been active in every aspect – right down to selecting the hops that give her debut beer a citrus flavor.
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And especially in choosing the name.
78 Brewing Co. is a tribute to the undefeated UConn teams she played on in 2008-09 and 2009-10 – teams that won two national championships and finished a combined 78-0. Appropriately, the first release is a hazy IPA called “78-0,” a tribute to UConn and her teammates on those teams.
She introduced 78-0 at a launch party on Friday at East Rock Brewing Co., in New Haven, Conn., where the beer was developed and manufactured. Head coach Geno Auriemma was there to help his former player celebrate.
The beer is available at East Rock Brewing, as well as Red Rock Cafe Storrs. It will be featured at some UConn events.
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“It’s very approachable. It’s smooth. Citrus and tropical. I’m excited,” she told Josh Pierson, the sports director of local News 8, of the beer.
“I’m a big beer lover. … I’ve just been literally brewing this idea since December. I just wanted to tell iconic stories that really represented excellence, and I wanted to start with our story and my teammates going 78-0.”
Appropriately, the can color is dark blue – like UConn’s team colors. Accents are white and gold.
The Hartford Courant reported that Charles plans to share the proceeds with teammates on the 2008-10 squads, as well as make contributions to the UConn Foundation and toward name-image-likeness funding for UConn athletes.
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Charles, 37, began her UConn career in 2006, and the 6-foot-4 center then went on to become the No. 1 overall selection of the WNBA draft in 2010. She spent the first four of her 15 WNBA seasons with the team that drafted her – the Connecticut Sun – before also playing for the New York Liberty, Washington Mystics, Phoenix Mercury and Atlanta Dream. She returned to the Sun for her final season in 2025.
She is set to call her second beer the “Sunset IPA” to honor her former team, the Sun, who are expected to relocate to Houston after this season concludes.
Charles, who is from New York City, said she has wonderful memories of UConn.
“I get emotional thinking about it. It was just such a fun time and I don’t know if we all cherished it the way that we should have,” she said. “Around that time, the conversation was that we were bad for women’s basketball because we were so dominant.
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“We were just keeping our head down for what we wanted to accomplish, which was a championship. Coach made the practices harder than the games, and that’s why we were able to be dominant.”
Charles ranks fifth all-time in scoring for the Huskies (2,346 points) and fifth in blocks. She holds the career record for rebounds (1.367). She won three national player of the year awards in 2010, duplicating the feat of teammate Maya Moore from the previous season.
At her retirement, she ranked second in WNBA history in points (8,396), behind fellow UConn alum Diana Taurasi, and first in rebounds (4,262).
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