Surly to close their beer hall Forever?

So it’s been another wild one in the Twin Cities. Earlier this week Surly Brewing Company made an announcement on social media that their beer hall employees declared their desire to unionize. Then a couple days later Surly made another announcement that they were straight up closing their beer hall all together.

This of course made the internet explode, but again what doesn’t these days. People started to accuse the brewery of union busting while the brewery itself stated that the plan to close the beer hall has been in the works for some time now.

The timing of both events couldn’t have been worse. Some say that Surly doesn’t want to listen to their employees on starting a union while others state there is no way a union could work anyway, especially now during the covid crisis.

I’m not sure how union stuff does work or how long it takes for a restaurant/brewery to decide to shut down a major part of the business but this entire thing looks pretty bad for Surly.

Personally I will say I can see the argument from both sides. First it’s no secret Surly has had it’s share of bad business dealings which involved the exit of Todd and his wife a couple years back. Then there was the tip pooling lawsuit which cost the brewery 2.5 million dollars. Most recently Surly decided to remove tips from the servers and rerouted it to being paid more per hour while a 15 percent charge was added to everyone’s bill. A lot of tip issues here apparently.

Second it’s no secret every restaurant is struggling right now. It doesn’t take a scientist to figure out most places wont make as much money as they did when you can only have a certain percent of the operation working.

Surly has a big space and not packing in as many people as they did before will start to show the results. Surly have stated that revenues are down 82% as compared to this time last year and if they remain open they will lose at least $750,000 this winter. That seems like a good argument.

But when just days prior to the announcement of the closing, the workers declared they wanted to form a union and then Surly declares the beer hall to shut down entirely, that looks pretty bad.

I have seen calls for boycotting Surly and others declaring they will never drink another beer brewed by Surly ever again. Craft beer people are very active in their choices on what and whos beer they buy. This union issue not only influences the beer drinking crowd but can also influence union people who are also Surly fans.

If this closure is truly in retaliation to the call to form a union, it may bite Surly in the ass. If you lose a big amount of you customers what happens next? Will the brewery be forced to sell to a big macro? And if they did go that route, who would even drink the beer?

I cant see a Budweiser or MolsonCoors owned Surly being sustainable or should I say if they sold to a major corporate brewing company they would loose major street cred, know what I’m sayin?

So if this closure was actually in the works before this week, lets see the documentation so they can save face and make the people shouting “union busters” look stupid. But if this was a knee jerk reaction on how to handle the call to unionize then that would be a huge blunder on Surly’s part and the downfall of a once legendary brewery in the Twin Cities.