In Trillium’s home state of Massachusetts, the minimum wage is $11, but tipped employees, of which Trillium considers its staff, must only make a base pay of at least $3.75. However, according to state law, “the employee must receive at least the $11.00 minimum wage when actual tips and wages are combined” and if combined wages and tips to not at least equal the regular minimum wage, “the employer must pay the employee the difference.”

According to the Globe, the reason for changing the hourly rate was meant to be a course correction, of sorts. Co-founder JC Tetreault told the paper that the pay cuts only impacted "a handful of longtime retail employees" who had been hired at a previous standard rate of $8.

“The brewery dropped the rate of pay to $5 an hour for new tipped employees as their workforce increased in recent years to include a popular beer garden on the Rose Kennedy Greenway, a new restaurant and brewery in Fort Point, and plans for a farm brewery in Connecticut,” the Globe reported.

This was enough to fire up Beer Advocate user "abagofit," who claimed to be a former Trillium employee, sharing they were fired from their job in part because of social media activity. Their statements on the site ranged from the mentioning the paycut to accusations of selling tank dregs as frozen beer or in growlers, as well as pouring tequila into tanks to flavor a beer.

“[Founders JC and Esther Tetreault] are well aware of the fact that people want the ‘prestige’ of working for a top brewery and are willing to be underpaid to build the resume,” he wrote in one post. “You can probably count on one hand the number of people who have lasted more than 3 years.”

The poster later clarified his comments, writing that retail staff make “well over minimum wage regardless of whether the hourly is 8 or 5” and that “they might be the highest paid staff per hour (with tips) in the entire place.”

Regardless of what stands in the brewery’s HR manual, the optics of the situation quickly deteriorated online. In brief statements to the Globe, JC Tetreault wouldn't say if pay rates would be restored. In his own post on the Beer Advocate forum, JC explained that the original $8 per hour pay rate came without tips. When Trillium instituted a change two years ago to $5, it included tips factored in, a change staff has asked to remain, he wrote in his post.

“Every business has to choose the approach that feels best for them and their teams,” he wrote. “For us, this allows us to offer greater staffing levels to keep wait times to a minimum, balances the workload for our team, and gives customers the option to tip which is why we started in the first place.”

In addition to the explanation, he also shared a list of benefits for full-time employees, which include health and dental insurance, 401(k) with company match, an annual cash bonus, free beer, and matching for charitable donations.

As these back-and-forth public spats tend to do, there’s no winner in a series of “he said,” rebuttals. But the core of where this issue started—pay and treatment of employees—is bound to be an ongoing challenge not just for Trillium, but the thousands of small businesses that make up the vast majority of the U.S. beer industry.

In a four-part series this spring reporting on issues of pay and employment, one of the most telling stats came from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, showing that average weekly wages at production breweries, across all jobs, were on steady decline from 2006 to 2016 as the number of breweries rapidly increased.