BEDFORD, Va. — Our recent beer release, YOUR MANAGER IS BITCH, has gone viral. What started as a joke, poking fun at an email we received from a disgruntled customer who was refused service after refusing to wear a mask in our taproom, exploded into a rallying cry echoed by service industry professionals round the globe.
The email is as follows:
SUBJECT: Y’all suck
MESSAGE: Your manager is bitch and your beer taste like hot old orange juice.
The aforementioned Bitch is our new GM, Brittany Canterbury, who worked her way up from server to bartender to manager in our taproom. As so many of the recent online comments attest, Brittany is actually a kind and hardworking individual. She and our staff have been routinely subjected to verbal abuse from customers who dislike our enforcement of the mask mandate.
We decided to fight back. We brewed a beer called YOUR MANAGER IS BITCH. We told the story on the can and printed the email verbatim.
We could not have anticipated the response. The post went viral on Facebook, 290,000 views and counting; 116K upvotes on reddit, and we are getting emails from all over the world, from France to Canada to Tasmania.
This ultimately isn’t about covid-deniers or opinions about mask wearing. It’s about honoring people’s fundamental dignity and humanity, and pushing back against the tired, outdated maxim that the customer is always right. As restaurants have fought to survive the pandemic, we’ve also been fighting to keep our staff safe and supported from inconsiderate and abusive customers.
YOUR MANAGER IS BITCH is the third beer in a series of releases we’ve done in response to trolls – we’ve “Trolled the Trolls” with a lime and ginger sour, posting on the can several acrid facebook comments received in response to our mask rules. We followed up with Closed by Christmas, celebrating the comment made by a customer who predicted our demise by the holidays.
We are happy to say we are open, and thriving, and will have made it through this pandemic by being crafty, resilient and taking no shit.