BrewDog Faces Backlash After Firing Four LGBTQ Employees at Indianapolis Taproom

After terminating four workers from its Indianapolis taproom earlier this week, BrewDog has also let go of the employee who approved the firings and hired an external human relations firm to investigate.

All four of the workers who were terminated on Monday, March 8, are members of the LGBTQ community; three are women and one is non-binary. The now-former employees said on social media and in interviews with Indianapolis-based WISH-TV News 8 that they were terminated because the company wanted a culture change.

“It’s just very strange that we seem to be singled out as a certain type of community that was fired,” former employee Kyrrha Myers told WISH.

BrewDog Indianapolis, which opened in September 2019, has been closed since December 2020, but the Scottish craft beer maker plans to reopen the location on March 26. The affected employees were told they would no longer be employed at the reopened taproom.

“The new general manager, who none of us have ever met — we don’t even know what he looks like — called us one by one and told us that we were all being fired because they wanted a change in culture at BrewDog,” former employee Erica O’Neill told WISH.

O’Neill added that the taproom’s general manager and executive chef — who are both women — had been fired in January, and men now hold both positions.

In a statement, BrewDog USA CEO Jason Block said the company “regret[s] the timing” of the terminations — which occurred on International Women’s Day — but said discrmination did not factor into the firings of the employees, who he said were terminated due to “prior performance issues.”

“We do not believe that gender nor sexual orientation influenced those decisions, and any such claims that they did will be fully investigated,” Block wrote. “Claims of discrimination of any kind are completely at odds with our values. Gender or sexual orientation influencing any decision is abhorrent and doesn’t belong in any business – let alone ours.”

However, the workers were not told of any concerns about their performance, former employee Jordan Dalton wrote on Twitter.

“We are asking for proof of the alleged performance issues,” Dalton wrote. “None of us were ever formally written up.”

BrewDog co-founder James Watt shared a statement on BrewDog’s crowd investment forum reiterating that the terminations were due to performance, but they were not carried out according to protocol.

“The manner in which these dismissals were handled was not aligned with our company values or internal processes,” he said. “Consequently, the person who instructed these dismissals to happen has now left our business.”

A spokesperson for BrewDog would not share details about employees’ performance and confirmed that the person who approved the terminations was let go, not the person who carried them out.

“We are investigating the ‘change in culture’ comment, as there is a dispute as to what was or wasn’t said,” the spokesperson told Brewbound.

BrewDog has hired Centric, a Columbus, Ohio-based human resources agency, to investigate the incident. The company plans to share the investigation’s findings, a spokesperson added.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect that the terminated employees are three women and one non-binary person.