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  • #31
    If the owners stated it is illegal to give away free beer then they could set up beer credit for the employees. This is how a few of the breweries I have worked for have dealt with this situation. What is good about this practice is the employee sees the value in the credit and the owners can track it. Where I currently work employees that are full time get more credit then part time employees and once the credit is gone the employees pay $1.50 per beer until the next month comes along. The owners should see the value of having their employees enjoy the products you produce. As you know people want to talk to the brewer so the owners should want you to not just work and go home. Good luck with this.

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    • #32
      As a business owner, I feel it is important to set up rules that apply to everyone. While I agree in giving employees an opportunity to enjoy the beer they made, I disagree with "free beer, but don't abuse it." That could mean different things to different people. Our rule is two free pints per day, per brewery employee at our tap room. Bar and kitchen staff get two free pints on days that they work. It all gets rung up as "employee beer". For 2014, that was a total of 5,661 pints. or 12 % of the pints poured and 6.8 % of all beer poured including growlers. So you can see it adds up quick. It is roughly 300 pints per employee per year.

      If employees are drinking in the tap room, the brewery is the best place they've ever worked at as far as the public with them knows. Our tap room is not the places to air grievances about management or the workplace.

      Beyond that we have an employee discount list for kegs and packaged beer.

      Sam

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      • #33
        This is interesting topic and sorry to rain if your parade.

        You guys are telling me that if I work on GM assembly line I am supposed to require to get new car every year because it is cheap for my employer to manufacture the product and I work on that line and I know how how car is made and how much cost it in raw material to make it.

        Your employer took a big challenge on himself/ herself and gave you a job. This way your employer is telling you that you will get compensated for the time and work spend in the job.

        It is not your beer. It is a brewery beer. Giving 12% of your beer sales as a freebies is short way to run out of business. Do you also ask for the pay raise at the end of the year too?

        And by the way when you go to your friends brewery, please pay for your beer. You would not want that he would run out of business would you?

        If you are unhappy with your compensation then talk to your employer about it.

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        • #34
          Funny, I didn't know Foxconn had a brewery... Do you allow bathroom breaks, or does that count as a Sick Day?

          I kid, I kid. Certainly nobody wants to give away the farm, but the car/beer comparison is rather specious. The economics of this business tends to result in brewers making ok, but not really great wages, unless they own an equity stake in the company. (And even then amiright! Haha, ha. Haaaaa.....) It's hard to pay qualified people what they're worth, which is why you see a lot of lateral movement as so many breweries are opening and expanding that really good brewers get poached for better gigs elsewhere. There are breweries that view their brewers as replaceable cogs in the big machine, worth exactly $10.37 an hour or whatever and no more. They can make good beer, but can also have staff turnover issues. Because if you come down hard on small expenses it reinforces exactly just what a line-item you consider your employees to be.

          But since we often can't pay them what they're fully worth, even if we'd like to, we try to add whatever perks we can. A couple shift pints or a growler fill might cost the brewery $1 in raw goods, but add $10 of perceived value to the employee. Over a week that's like $50 in extra wages that the brewery couldn't afford, for $5 of beer. Couple this with a longstanding tradition of free beer for brewers in the industry and it's just an unspoken part of the deal. My stance on this is that the extra cost of some beers, swag, occasional staff parties, conference attendance and career development opportunities (CBC, MBAA District Meetings, etc.) creates a corporate culture where everyone feels part of the team, rather than part of the machine. Creating a workplace environment where people want to be, and feel invested in the project, is one way to partially make up for the lower wages. And on the macro scale I think the pencils out in your favor. Being down a brewer for a couple weeks while you look for a replacement, or have to frantically train up someone, will cost a lot more in lost production and remaining employee frustration than some pints of beer. Particularly if your reputation out among the local brewers is as profit-obsessed, penny-pinching a$$holes. Because everyone knows everyone, and everyone talks...

          And back on the subject of cars, a hundred years ago Ford raised its daily wages to an unheard-of $5 a day. Ford did this not out of altruism, but firstly, because turnover was huge in the industry at the time, and secondly so that his workers could afford to buy his cars. Pay people as well as you can, in both wages and perks, and you create the loyalty of an experienced, skilled workforce. Pay peanuts and you get monkeys.
          Russell Everett
          Co-Founder / Head Brewer
          Bainbridge Island Brewing
          Bainbridge Island, WA

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          • #35
            Originally posted by Bainbridge View Post
            Funny, I didn't know Foxconn had a brewery... Do you allow bathroom breaks, or does that count as a Sick Day?
            That's kind of a shitty joke to make. I assume Thirsty Monk's English is way better than your Czech. Or maybe it wasn't meant to sound as mean as it did.

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            • #36
              Ah I see what you're saying. No it wasn't meant to sound mean, nor be a remark on anyone's ethnicity or language skills. I just needed a well known example of hideous working conditions. (If you've got to install Suicide Prevention Nets at your factory, you know something is terribly wrong.)

              My Czech is non-existent, but my German is only ganz schrecklich...
              Russell Everett
              Co-Founder / Head Brewer
              Bainbridge Island Brewing
              Bainbridge Island, WA

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              • #37
                Bainbridge, it is a challenge to find employees that are exited to work for you. Compensation is just a part of it.

                Motivation is a better factor how to retain them. They should believe in what you are doing and what you project.

                If the motivation is just a compensation then they will skip the ship if opportunity is there. You can be unhappy with the job making a lot of money or happy and feel appreciated with just enough money.

                By the way I am working quite hard that my employees are happy and enjoy working for me. I just do not think that giving the product away is a wise idea.

                Signing off the head cleaner and delivery man.

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                • #38
                  IMO, if giving away a free beer or two per day to your brewers makes or breaks your business, you have much bigger problems that need addressing.

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                  • #39
                    I'm honestly surprised that this has turned into this much of a discussion. Employees pay full price for beverages. Those are the rules that the ownership put into place, they pay for them the same as the rest of the staff. I know many local bars that do the same thing or at most offer a discounted shift beer as long as that beer is below a certain price point. I'll be a little straight forward here and say that if I were the ownership the OP would no longer have a position at my brewpub if I caught wind of this post. 6 months at a job you are honestly lucky to have is not long enough to start complaining, build your soapbox before you climb up on it. The whole post comes across a bit on the whiny and ungrateful side. Not to mention it is basically stated that the brewer now boycotts the very establishment that gave him a shot at brewing professionally. Could the policy be better with maybe a free shift drink? Sure but it would have to be company wide, not just for the brewer. Would I feel like I was in a position 6 months in to complain about it? No way. Policies differ from place to place, if you don't like them you are free to move along or at the very least spend enough time working and proving your worth before crying about such trivial shit. I'll only stay and drink my beer if it's free... yeah that's a great message to send throughout the establishment.

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                    • #40
                      I used to work at a brewery where the policy was 2 cases of beer per month. Some beers were "off-limits" because they were too much in demand and/or too costly to produce (such as Barleywine) to be part of the perks.

                      I enjoy beer as much as the next person, but the #1 priority, from an ownership standpoint, is to have a healthy business that is able to be sustainable. I've seen people get into the industry because they are most interested in getting free beer. They tend not to last too long, either through their expectations, or their inability to remain sober during working hours.
                      Kevin Shertz
                      Chester River Brewing Company
                      Chestertown, MD

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                      • #41
                        Could the policy be better with maybe a free shift drink? Sure but it would have to be company wide, not just for the brewer
                        Why does it have to be company wide? Why can't the head brewer be offered better incentives than someone lower on the totem pole? That's like saying companies can't offer upper level management bigger bonuses than their entry level underlings. Businesses can and do this all the time.

                        I understand the "it's a business" argument, but properly compensating your employees and making them happy is an extremely important part of running a business. Turnover/training is expensive and most brewers are generally not paid very well for how difficult of a job it can be. These brewers, especially the head brewer, are making decisions daily that can cost thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars. Being that stingy about a pint or two when a disgruntled/absent-minded brewer could easily dump WAY more than that down the drain w/ a less than ideal yeast/trub dump just doesn't make sense to me. The penny pinching isn't worth the loss of morale.

                        (just my opinion of course)

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                        • #42
                          So give me beer or I will try to ruin your business? If someone is going to become disgruntled over a pint then they are going to be disgruntled over just about anything that reflects them not getting their way. It's just as trivial to not give the beer as it as to complain about it.

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                          • #43
                            So give me beer or I will try to ruin your business?
                            You missed the point completely, so I'll make it easier to understand for you:

                            1) We trust our brewers to make decisions daily that could cost us thousands and thousands of dollars
                            2) They generally don't get paid very well
                            3) Free beer is a pretty damn cheap way to keep morale high and turnover low.

                            Hope that helps.

                            Comment


                            • #44
                              I didn't miss the point at all. I was pointing out a rather weak argument. My point was that this was the decision made by the ownership of a NEW restaurant of which most do not survive more than a year or two, so having a handle on expenses is not a bad thing. We know nothing about the other compensation involved here so yes beer is an easy way but it's not the only way to keep up the morale. Maybe the compensation package should have been asked about prior to accepting the job and opening day. Complaining about it now just seems petty given the information provided.

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                              • #45
                                "None of the owners of the brewery worked in a brewery or knew much about how brewery's work." - from the title post.

                                I think the point that this showcases what happens when the culture of brewery life conflicts with owners who may not be aware of it, or are aware of it and just don't care. Hopefully this thread will shed some light on that.

                                Brewers generally expect a shift pint, or a case a week, or low fill bottles, or whatever it may be, as a matter of course and part of the job. End of the day, enjoy a beer, think about how you can make it even better next time. Repeat.

                                Owners have a bottom line to watch, and fair enough for them too. Someone has to. This is a business, after all. Can't give away the shop.

                                Obviously if it's seriously gutting your profits, or if people are getting trashed all the time, this is a problem and very much not cool. That's all been covered and I don't think needs more discussion. But my position is that NO BEER EVER comes across as miserly, and creates a negative impression of the management. It says either "We don't make enough for you to get 50 cents worth of the beer you made for us.", in which case I'm fleeing this sinking ship, or "We are keeping all the profit for our shareholders...screw you, lowly employees." It also says I can probably look forward to hearing "Do we really need fresh yeast?", or "Just use the broken one...", or "I don't think it's that bad, ship it out!" Which is not enough alone to say, make me quit outright, but pile on some other workplace shenanigans and I'll be on probrewer at night looking a new gig.

                                I wear both hats. So I know what our books say. I know what we can pay our employees, and what I'd like to pay them if I could. I also am down there brewing, and in the taproom trying the beers, talking over pints with the staff after work, checking up on morale.

                                Our rule is simple, don't overdo it. One or two shift pints. A growler on the weekend. Discount kegs. Merch at cost. Track it, expense it, easy.
                                Russell Everett
                                Co-Founder / Head Brewer
                                Bainbridge Island Brewing
                                Bainbridge Island, WA

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