Social media posts by Josh Stylman, the CEO of Brooklyn-based Threes Brewing, drew backlash earlier this week after he called New York City’s vaccine mandate and others like it “a crime against humanity” and those who don’t speak out against them “a conspirator.”
In an interview with The New York Times, Stylman said he views the city’s requirement of on-premise establishments to ask patrons for proof of vaccination against COVID-19 for indoor service as “biomedical segregation.”
Earlier this month, Stylman tweeted that the policy stands “against any defensible scientific reality” and “echoes early sentiments expressed in the Jim Crow South, Nazi Germany, Stalinism, Maoism, and other dark times in human history.” Stylman said he was “not deluded” enough to believe that modern day New York City is akin to Germany in 1943, but added that “from everything I learned from my family, all Holocaust survivors, what’s happening now sure does resemble Germany in 1933.”
Stylman’s comments prompted Threes to issue a statement Thursday disavowing his remarks.
“We do not stand by our CEO Joshua Stylman’s comparisons of the mandates to history atrocities based on religion or race,” the unsigned statement read. “We think the comparisons are inappropriate and inaccurate.”
New York City’s proof of vaccination policy was announced in August and has been in place since September. Threes clarified that its “company policy has been and will continue to be to comply with all government mandates.”
“We have people with lots of different opinions, and we’re an organization that’s made up 100% of people who have a conscience and care about our world,” Threes wrote. “We don’t believe that for-profit organizations should be run to maximize short-term profit at the expense of social good, the community, and the people.”
As anger built on social media from drinkers who opposed Stylman’s viewpoint, he tried to urge consumers not “to hate on the brand [because] of one person’s personal views.” Drinkers pointed out that, as the CEO, consumers can conflate his opinion with that of the company, and Stylman acknowledged that he would be shielded from the backlash.
“Most of the damage will hit the people who work here,” he wrote. “I am a middle-aged man who is far more financially stable than the people who work here.”
Stylman admitted that the volume of drinkers’ reactions caught him by surprise.
“Candidly, I didn’t expect this backlash to impact them,” he tweeted. “I wish it didn’t and for that, I feel terrible.”
Threes operates taprooms in the Gowanus and Greenpoint neighborhoods of Brooklyn and runs a seasonal outpost on Governors Island. In 2020, the most recent year for which data is available, Threes produced 5,530 barrels of beer, according to the Brewers Association.