In fact, as of mid-September, it says so right on their website: in the days following the online pushback, Monday Night composed and published a detailed explanation of their core beliefs as a brewery—beliefs that, according to the founders, had always been integral to the company, but also beliefs they’d never taken the time to reflect upon and explicitly communicate, to the public or to their own employees, in the seven years they’ve been operating as a brewery. That is, until the shit hit the fan.

Could the brewery’s leaders have done a better job parsing through the potential ramifications of agreeing to such an event? Yes. Might they have thought a bit more about how it looked to some of their neighbors, like the primarily black residents of Southwest Atlanta? Yup. Should they have listened to the woman on staff who balked at the idea of hosting Kemp, who voiced her concern to the brewery’s leadership beforehand, who was ultimately overridden, and who was later reduced to tears explaining all of this at that AMA? Do I even have to ask?

Of course, there was another group of people angry in the wake of the Kemp news that week, but they weren’t mad at Monday Night: they were mad at the people who were mad at Monday Night. Enter the “stick to beer” constituency: the group of people who have the privilege of not letting politics infiltrate their day-to-day life, who roll their eyes at the prospect of a business like Monday Night stooping to a public apology or “pandering to leftie snowflakes,” who’d never expect or desire their neighborhood-made Pilsner to come with a side of politics.

They believe it’s any organization’s constitutional right to serve or host or profit off of whomever they like. (This is correct, incidentally, though not something anyone in this scenario wanted to take away. But in light of Kemp’s stance on so-called “religious freedom” legislation, it’s also kind of ironic). These are the people who’d prefer not to think about social issues like, say, toddlers in cages at the border as they’re drinking their beer, and the people whose safety and livelihoods likely won’t be affected by said issues.

For breweries operating in the hellscape that is 2018, determining whether to be politically or socially involved, and at what level, isn’t just a matter of morals: it’s also marketing. There are consumers who insist that commerce can—and should—exist in a moral vacuum, and there are consumers who see that kind of neutrality as spineless, to whom “being apolitical” is tantamount to being complicit. Breweries are left to answer the question: who do we serve?