Less than a month after anonymous organizers installed protest art outside the Copenhagen headquarters of Mikkeller brewery, featuring accusations of racism and sexism, the company is once again the subject of criticism. This time, four former employees have shared detailed accounts of how they feel Mikkeller created a workplace where gender-based bullying, harassment, retaliation, and indifference to quality control and employee safety protocols went unchecked. This allowed the misconduct to continue, they say, and resulted in an unsafe and unhealthy workplace.
These former employees, all women, say that managers disregarded misconduct, and that when staff spoke up about concerns, the problems were ignored. Three of the women worked at Mikkeller’s San Diego brewery and taproom. The fourth worked at Warpigs, a Copenhagen brewpub that Mikkeller owns and operates in conjunction with Indiana’s 3 Floyds Brewing. All four say that during their time with the company, which spans from late 2014 to early 2020, Mikkeller either lacked formal human resources staff or had ineffectual HR staff, so employees were expected to bring complaints to managers—some of whom were the subjects of employees’ complaints.
They further allege that brewery leadership in Copenhagen—including founder and creative director Mikkel Borg Bjergsø and chief operations officer Jacob Gram Alsing—actively participated in bullying and harassment or knowingly allowed it to continue.
The former Warpigs employee left her job in events and communications at the brewery after 10 months that she describes as “awful.” (She asked not to be named to protect her privacy.) During that time, she alleges she was targeted and belittled by male managers and co-workers, including Alsing and a now-former Warpigs general manager, who were, at different times, her direct supervisors. The GM, she says, pantomimed male masturbation in front of her and other employees on several occasions when he wanted her to stop talking. She alleges managers also undermined her work and screamed at her in front of co-workers.
“They let me know that if I wasn’t happy with how [Alsing] said things, that was my problem and I should leave,” she says.
All of the women say the company’s neglect for safety and well-being caused them emotional and/or physical harm, and they all left the company because of it. The three former San Diego employees described high staff turnover rates, owing to employees who they say quit because of bullying or were fired for complaining about it. Two of the former San Diego employees referred to the brewery as a “revolving door.”
“I used to describe it as a ‘fuck it’ brewery,” says Megan Stone, a former assistant brewer at Mikkeller San Diego who has continued to work as a brewer as well as a speaker and advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion. (Stone was named Person of the Year for 2021 by the Craft Beer Marketing Awards.) She describes a general lack of concern for workers’ well-being and safety that, coupled with the absence of formal HR, allowed dangerous and distressing behavior to go unpunished. “Overall I feel like the workplace is extremely toxic and juvenile.”
In an email to GBH, Mikkeller’s CEO, Kenneth Madsen, declined to make anyone from the brewery available for a phone call. In a statement, Madsen wrote: “Mikkeller has always—and will continue to promote and honor diversity, inclusiveness, and equality. The recent focus has made us aware that it is very important to strengthen these areas even more and make sure that all of our employees feel safe and that everyone knows what Mikkeller stands for.”
Madsen listed concrete steps the company has taken to address inclusivity and safety, including the establishment of a staff working group, the drafting of an employee survey, and the hiring of an external diversity consultant in February. None of the changes, however, were put into place before mid-2019, and at least half were instituted this year or are still in the planning phase.
Former employees say they’re sharing their stories now so that the company can be held accountable in the eyes of the public. As Brienne Allan did in the U.S., a woman named Fanny Wandel, who lives in Copenhagen, has been collecting and sharing stories of harassment and sexism via her Instagram, many of which focus on Mikkeller. It has created a groundswell of criticism that also resulted in the brewery’s Wikipedia page being edited to reflect recent controversy.
The brewery and its satellite bars have expanded to 23 locations globally, thanks in large part to the company’s reputation as a trendsetter. That prestige, they say, was a greater priority for the company than beer quality or employee morale.
“We fail to … do things by the book,” Mikkeller writes on the “our vision” portion of its website. “As the company has grown an urgency to get organized has arisen, but we still prefer—and constantly remind ourselves—to follow our gut rather than our brain.”
The former Warpigs employee believes she was bullied because of her gender. She says she was told by other managers to take notes at meetings in which she was the only woman; she also says Alsing undermined her professional accomplishments by telling her that colleagues and journalists only worked with her because they wanted to have sex with her.
Mikkeller did not make managers or executives available for comment, but said in a statement that its executive team takes such matters seriously and “has acted on every case related to these issues that has been reported to Mikkeller’s main administration.”
She says there was no one at Warpigs or Mikkeller she felt she could talk to, because there was no HR staff at the time and her manager was the one bullying her. When she tried to stand up for herself to the GM, she says he would give her the silent treatment, speaking to other employees but not to her.
“My mental health was absolutely rock bottom,” she says of that period. “I was crying every day when I came home from work and I decided to quit without having a backup, really. It was one of the best decisions I ever made.”
She was able to step away from the daily stress of working at Warpigs and put distance between herself and that experience. But she says that after she found a new job, Alsing told her new employer that the company was “making a big mistake” in hiring her.
The broad behaviors she alleges—bullying, harassment, intimidation, indifference, and retaliation—were echoed by the three other women who spoke to GBH.
Stone describes the culture at Mikkeller San Diego similarly: She says she was in “a constant state of anxiety,” resulting in her crying at work regularly. Stone, who is gay, says Mikkeller San Diego’s head brewer at the time told co-workers he would “fuck her straight.” (Mikkeller says that head brewer was terminated.) She says co-workers repeatedly questioned her ability to perform physical brewing tasks like cleaning tanks or lifting bags of grain because she was a woman.
She calls such behavior “the definition of a boys’ club,” and alleges managers did nothing to stop it. Madsen says Mikkeller fired five “bad actors” from its San Diego brewery, though she did not name those individuals or provide a timeline of when the terminations took place.
“The harassment and the bullying from the staff at Mikkeller was something that I brought up with the general manager, Matt Hanlon … I brought this issue up many, many times, but it was brushed off,” Stone says, adding that she was not aware of any HR staff at the time. She says she tried to convince Hanlon of the severity of the problem, telling him via email that her mental health was “at a breaking point.” She says he told her she could have one day off.
Stone didn’t feel that escalating her concerns further up in the company was an option, describing a disconnect between non-managerial San Diego employees and Copenhagen headquarters. It was her impression that higher-ups in Copenhagen wouldn’t believe her, anyway.
“It trickles down from the top,” Stone says of the company culture. “People from Mikkeller are putting like-minded individuals in roles of leadership and power, and people in those roles get to decide who’s part of their clique, who they want to be buddies with, and who they want to not give a shit about.”
After 11 months at Mikkeller San Diego, Stone quit.
The lack of a full-time employee dedicated to human resources, or any formal HR apparatus, is a common thread among all the former employees’ stories. Mikkeller says it put in place formal policies and procedures, hired an independent HR staff member, and created an HR process for investigating and acting on claims of harassment, bullying, and safety violations; however, the earliest this would have occurred is mid-2019.
Only Erika Raye—who was employed as Mikkeller San Diego’s quality assurance and quality control (QA/QC) coordinator from December 2017 to February 2020—says there were employees in an HR function during her tenure there. She says that Mikkeller San Diego’s HR duties were shared between two people who also had other jobs: an accounting employee and an office manager. Because it was no one’s sole job, she says, there was a lax attitude toward employee concerns and typical HR issues were brushed to the side.
Raye went to HR twice to report that male co-workers weren’t respecting her authority as head of quality and were refusing to participate in tasting panels and trainings that she’d organized. She says that when she tried to implement quality control measures, some male brewers, including the head brewer, would ignore her directives and fail to use the new processes. She says that when HR realized her complaints about the head brewer and others weren’t criminal in nature, it seemed less interested in what she had to say.
“The legal liability … they didn’t find one so it seemed like they didn’t care,” Raye says. “It felt like any concern that was brought up about Dan [Cady], they swept under the rug. … Any time it was brought up, it didn’t matter.”
Raye says this behavior was exacerbated by the lack of a formal organizational structure. She wanted there to be consequences for colleagues who were shirking their QC training, for example, but she says she didn’t even know which manager they reported to. Stone also describes a lack of structure and onboarding, saying she received just two days of training to familiarize herself with equipment when she was hired.
“There was no proof of who reported to who. And in the first two years I worked there, there was no employee handbook or code of conduct, no governing document,” Raye says. “So you could treat someone really badly as long as it wasn’t illegal. You weren’t violating any policies because none of them existed.”
The former Warpigs employee says she would have liked to have an outside HR contact to talk to about her manager’s behavior, but that no such person existed. She says management told employees that personnel issues were to be discussed internally.
“They want people to come to them. If I were to do that, that would be me going to Jacob, who was a bully to me throughout those 10 months. Where’s the safe space in that?” she says.
Mikkeller’s management still encourages this internal dialogue. In an email to GBH about the protest art installation, head of press Pernille Pang wrote: “We really think that a visit at our HQ will change the conception that the protesters have of us. We are friendly people, and we like to have conversations about anything related to Mikkeller and the beer industry.”
But the company has typically been tight-lipped about its operations. The ownership structures of many of its global endeavors are obscured by non-disclosure agreements and complicated partnerships. Such murkiness has plagued the brand in the past, and was a factor in the closure of Mikkeller NYC in 2020.
It’s not clear that internal conversations of the type Mikkeller is proposing have worked in the past. In early 2019, Raye says a new general manager at the brewery called employees into his office individually to ask about complaints of discrimination and harassment. She says he asked whether she thought the behavior was systemic and she replied that she believed it was, citing many examples she’d seen throughout her employment. Raye says she wasn’t aware that this internal investigation yielded any results.
“It sounds like it was inconclusive because the root cause is that it’s so ingrained in their culture that it’s okay to treat people like this,” she says. “And they’re not willing to examine themselves.”
A complacent company culture also extended to the Mikkeller brewhouse in San Diego, three former employees say, and stemmed from a lack of attention to standard operating procedures.
“It was more about getting product out over any sort of quality,” says Teresa Pominville, a former taproom manager who worked there from 2017 to 2018. “We attempted a QC program, and they eventually hired someone, but the whole program was just kind of a joke.”
She says that just as her suggestions about how to improve the taproom or retail experience were brushed off, so were concerns about quality or brewing practices. During the time frame Pominville describes, Mikkeller’s San Diego production was indeed increasing rapidly. Data from the Brewers Association shows the brewery’s production more than tripled in 2018, to 11,336 barrels from 3,000 barrels the year prior.
“Something they could have done better is letting the people they hired, the professionals they hired, do their jobs,” Pominville says.
Raye, the QA/QC coordinator, says her attempts to improve beer quality were ignored. For example, she says some brewers refused to attend panels to taste for diacetyl, an off-flavor in beer, and that her request to purchase an alcolyzer to ensure more consistent ABV readings was denied.
Mikkeller says that it implemented “safety protocols and procedures in the [San Diego] brewery” and formed a safety committee; though as with the hiring of HR, that did not take place any earlier than mid-2019.
“Everything was shot down like, ‘This is the way we’ve always done it,’” she says. “Their commitment to quality was not what you’d expect from a brewery that ships beer internationally. It was almost just like they knew there were problems but they didn’t think it was their problem, like, it must be the way you’re storing it in your bottle shop or how it’s being shipped.”
Stone alleges even more distressing indifference: A lack of care for employees’ physical safety. Stone says brewers’ hoses weren’t properly graded for pressure or temperature, and that a hose once burst and sprayed a fellow brewer with hot water. (She doesn’t believe his injuries were severe.) Brewers asked management for proper hoses, she says, and were told to use what they had.
Stone additionally says flammable ingredients and dangerous equipment were placed haphazardly around the brewery, and that brewers who made careless mistakes weren’t corrected or disciplined. She also says that within the first few months of working at Mikkeller, she was left in the warehouse alone until 1 a.m. to finish up a brewing process that she was promised to have help with. When she quit the brewery, she says, colleagues asked her to call the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. (A search of OSHA’s enforcement inspections database does not yield any results for Mikkeller within the last five years.)
“A representative from Denmark would come through every few months and remind us how cool Mikkeller is and how lucky we were to work there, then sort of just make empty promises and leave,” Stone says.
Working for almost a year in a brewery that didn’t value her physical or mental health, Stone says, took its toll. She began taking antidepressant medication, and even after she left the brewery, the experience of working there was difficult for her romantic partner to understand. The recent outpouring of #MeToo accounts within the industry has brought memories of working at Mikkeller back, and has rekindled her anger.
“I want people to know what the real Mikkeller is like,” Stone says. “I feel like it’s a lot of smoke and mirrors, and [Mikkeller] gets to hide behind their cool reputation and quirky beer. I want people to know what’s going on behind the scenes.”
Indeed, all four women say their goal in sharing their stories now is to affect change. Some would like to see Mikkeller and individual people take responsibility for the harm they’ve caused. Others are skeptical that will ever happen, but see value in sharing their stories to let other women know they’re not alone.
“I spent a long time thinking it was my fault,” the former Warpigs employee says. “If there’s anything to come from sharing these experiences, it’s for any young woman entering a male-dominated industry who’s being told stuff she shouldn’t be told, to know it’s not her fault.”
Note: Some names are omitted from this story, as GBH was unable to make contact with those individuals to respond to accusations contained here.
Words by Kate Bernot