Founders Brewing Shows No Signs of Wanting to Do Better
I’m looking at a bottle of Founders Barrel-Aged Backwoods Bastard that’s covered with dust. A date, “11/19,” as in November 2019, is written on the label in black Sharpie. That’s a long time to age a bottle, possibly too long, but I’m still not sure I will ever drink it.
And it’s one of my favorite beers.
In fact, in the months before I bought that bottle, I was telling people that Founders had one of my favorite barrel programs. Their annual and seasonal barrel-aged beers were not all home runs, but you couldn’t deny they were interesting, fun, and often very good. We have access to a lot of great barrel-aged beer in Chicagoland, but I always looked forward to what Founders was doing.
Obviously, discontinuing patronage of one brewery in the age of craft beer is not a huge sacrifice, all things considered; there are plenty more BA beers to choose from.
But that’s not to say it wasn’t emotional. I’m picky enough to have plenty of beers I don’t like, but in principle I like to like breweries, especially the more local they are. I used to live in Grand Rapids. I still visit. They were among my favorite breweries in town.
But I just couldn’t deal with them anymore.
What’s Wrong with Founders?
Back in November of 2019, I thought about writing a piece called, “My Last Founders Beer?” It was going to take the safely noncontroversial view that the leadership at Founders had done wrong by its BIPOC employees and that I was joining the masses of socially conscious beer drinkers who would stop drinking Founders beer until they righted the ship.
This was in the wake of the Tracy Evans story. Evans, an African American, worked at Founders’ Detroit tap room and filed a racial discrimination lawsuit alleging less-qualified white employees with disciplinary records had been promoted over him and that leadership had been lenient about the use of racial slurs against him.
While Founders denied everything and claimed it would win a suit, they wound up settling with Evans.
Settling is always a mixed bag since it means a lot of the story will never come to light. Evans had to make the best choice for himself, of course, and he seems to have thought enough of the truth had made it into the light that he didn’t need his day in court to have made his point. After all, an embarrassing transcript of a deposition with the brewery’s co-founders had been leaked and showed them being either racially incompetent or wilfully obtuse.
When You Leave Talent on the Table Like That
The kicker, for me, was when their new diversity and inclusion director, Graci Harkema, loudly resigned with a letter detailing shocking indifference to her authority and disrespect for her role.
Here was the person they had made a big deal about bringing on to help change their culture; she was the real deal, and I had been impressed and excited when I learned of the hire. But here she left within months because they showed no interest in actually letting her have any impact.
It was a totally dumpster fire to anyone who cared about this stuff — and it made the Chicago Tribune and NBC, so it wasn’t an insider story by any means. Lots of people posted videos of themselves dumping Canadian Breakfast Stout and Kentucky Breakfast Stout down the drain, and many people said they were done with the brewery.
In other words, I wasn’t in the vanguard or taking a risky stand. This isn’t about me being particularly heroic. I only wanted to add my voice to the chorus in solidarity.
Only I never got around to it. Life happened, and then the pandemic happened, etc.
Why Talk About Founders Now?
So why am I writing about it now?
The premise of the earlier piece was going to be: “I may have bought my last bottle of Founders beer, but I’m going to hold onto it in the hopes that they will do better, and when they do, I’ll drink it in celebration.”
I had hoped that the online backlash, however small it may have been, and in particular the embarrassment of completely failing to profit from Harkema’s expertise would wake them up and lead them toward real transformation.
The question was, how would we know if they had really changed? If you go on their site, they certainly have learned to talk the talk with their “DEI Commitment.” It’s a short bit of text, but if you click to learn more you can find a list of legitimate and respectable initiatives.
But then there’s the news today, as reported in the Detroit Free Press: “Founders Brewing Co. faces another racial discrimination lawsuit.”
Seriously?
Alas, it appears to be the same nonsense all over again. Naeemah Dillard accuses the brewery of tolerating insensitive and bigoted comments; ignoring, overlooking, and neglecting her input despite giving her a manager title; pay disparity; and apparently not making real internal change since the events of 2019.
Fool me once…
So I went downstairs to my “beer cellar,” which is to say the space beneath the table I have my beer fridge on, and I pulled out that Barrel-Aged Backwoods Bastard again.
I wanted to believe they could do better. I do believe they can do better. But they have not demonstrated a real commitment to doing more than making bullet points for their DEI page.
I’d like to say the takeaway here is that you have to be genuine about DEI if you want it to work. That’s true, but just as Founders survived Tracy Evans, I wouldn’t be surprised if they survive Naeemah Dillard. I mean, it actually hurt Bud Lite to take a DEI stand, and that was a minimum-effort PR stunt.
Founders appears to be of the ilk that won’t change unless it affects their bottom line. There are probably enough people who either don’t care or think it’s politically courageous to side with bigoted companies that will keep them doing just fine.
Or maybe this will be the wakeup call we hoped Tracy Evans and Graci Harkema were.
But I don’t think you need a DEI director to value mutual respect among staff and taking advantage of the talent everyone brings to the table. Dillard’s case is not merely about bigotry, it’s bad management.
And as more and more people get fed up with bad management, we’ll start to see the market pressure that may finally get Founders’ founders’ attention.
Sometimes You Can Only Cry
Until then, it doesn’t look like the hoped-for celebration is coming any time soon. They say sometimes you have to either laugh or cry. Well, sometimes you can only cry.
Should I dump that bottle? Maybe. It would make a decent video for the socials, I guess.
Or maybe I’ll drink it after all for the sake of the legitimate craftsmanship that goes into the beer, and in mourning for a broken relationship with a brand that could be so much more than it is.
Here’s to one day deserving the people who make — and drink — your beer, Founders.
Feature photo by Joseph Frank on Unsplash
