Big Breweries Behaving Badly
Update: This is absolutely brutal. Nice work, Lagunitas!
There is a long and now boring debate about the supposed immorality of corporate breweries and virtue of small breweries—or the absence (on both counts) thereof. While we can mostly agree that that’s a complicated issue, one thing became clear to me this week: large American craft breweries owned by foreign corporations aren’t as responsive to local communities as the corner brewpub. Two egregious cases surfaced this week, and their bad behavior should be shared as broadly as possible.
1. Founders Brewing, in the midst of a racial discrimination lawsuit, has a manager pretending he doesn’t see race.
In a deposition of this lawsuit, Founders' Detroit general manager Dominic Ryan pretends he didn’t know that Tracy Evans, the man who brought the lawsuit, is Black. The best way to communicate the startling level of cynicism isn’t a summary, but hearing Ryan’s own words. I’ll excerpt a portion, but click the link above to hear a fuller account—it’s gobsmacking.
Jack Schulz (Evans’ attorney): And did you ever realize that Tracy’s skin [is] Black?
Dominic Ryan: That’s not … I mean, is his skin different from mine? Yes.
Schulz: How?
Ryan: What do you mean “how”? It’s a different color.
Schulz: And what is the difference of that color?
Ryan: It’s darker.
Schulz: And that means? Founders Attorney: Objection. Vague question.
Schulz: I mean, we could … This could be a one-sentence answer, you know. So by your … I guess your testimony is you have no idea if Tracy is a minority, if he’s African-American?
Ryan: I don’t know Tracy’s lineage, so I can’t speculate on whether he’s … if he’s from Africa or not.
Now, keep in mind that Evans charged Founders with a “racist internal corporate culture,” citing several examples of what he described as blatant racism. Those are very serious charges for any company, but particularly one in an industry that is disproportionately white. Founders has denied the charges, of course, and has offered implausible explanations for some of the charges. One would imagine, given the unfolding PR nightmare, that the company would be bending over backward to demonstrate the lack of racist corporate culture. They should want to appeal to those willing to give them the benefit of the doubt here. But if anyone was only half sure Founders was racist, this erases all doubt. Good god. (In August, the Spanish company Mahou acquired nearly all of Founders—they had owned 30% and bumped that up to 90%).
2. Lagunitas announced it was closing the event space it offered to nonprofits, stranding dozens who have planned events there.
Ezra at The New School broke this story today:
Lagunitas Brewing opened its Portland “Community Room” in 2016, before they fully sold the Petaluma, California-based company to Heineken in May 2017. Yesterday, word got out that Lagunitas Brewing had closed the community room without notice, all employees were let go with a severance, and all non-profit charity events canceled.
According to a staff member with knowledge of the situation who emailed The New School but requested anonymity, “nonprofits who were granted this donation are now, well, [screwed]. They have paid for licensing, catering, mcs, bands, sold tickets, and budgeted according to the donation approved by lagunitas. There was a event on Wednesday for girls on the run, and countless more the rest of the month that have all been canceled with a cold email [sic].”
To remind you, Heineken bought Lagunitas in two half-billion dollar bites a few years back. Heineken controls 10% of global beer sales. The idea that Lagunitas was in such a dire financial situation that it had to precipitously shutter the Community Room and strand these nonprofits is laughable on its face. Yet that’s what they’re claiming:
As crisis management goes this is…not good. No one believes they “held out as long as they could,” nor does that begin to explain why they 1) kept taking reservations and 2) let none of their nonprofit partners know this was coming. The addition of offering beer as a kind of special pleading—”hey, don’t hate us, free beer!”—makes the whole thing so much worse. You know who gives free beer to nonprofits? Nearly every damn brewery out there. Most do not use it as a shield to cover up inexcusable corporate misbehavior. The reality is that Heineken just didn’t give a damn and was willing to take a PR hit to dump this little project it no longer wished to support. Let’s hope the hit catches their attention.
There’s a lesson here, and an important one. In the moments after this news was shared on the Beervana Facebook page, a local business raced in to help. North Portland’s Saraveza pub has event space, and owner Jeremy Lewis offered to help those stranded nonprofits. Local ownership matters. For Heineken HQ—and even Lagunitas, which is 600 miles away—Portland is a distant and declining market. It’s hard to see it on a human level. Here in Portland, these nonprofits are part of our community; they enrich and support Portland. Local businesses have a personal stake in this community.
Let’s run a hypothetical. Imagine that Founders and Lagunitas were still small breweries selling most of their beer in their home towns. Would they have done the same things these foreign-owned national craft breweries just did? It’s really hard for me to imagine it. The human scale still matters, and it allows us to see the consequences of our actions. I just hope that the outrage over these incidents causes enough people to step away from Founders and Lagunitas that they get the message.