Hi David,
We're sorry to hear that you didn’t have a good experience while visiting us recently. We’d love to have you back for a do-over, as the vast majority of our visitors have a very pleasant experience and come back over and over. We try very hard to make every customer a happy one - and that's not just a marketing line, we really do.
In the meantime, we appreciate your feedback and we’d like to respond directly to some of your comments as they are not completely accurate.
As your visit was on a Saturday, our busiest day of the week, we had three people on staff in the tasting room - not "no staff" as you stated. The average age of those staff is 29, so not really "kids" as it were. Many times you may only see one or two staff, as the others could be busy restocking the keg room, cleaning tables or similar. This also does mean that sometimes you have to wait in line for service. We try to minimize those waits as much as possible and generally they are only a few minutes at best. If you waited 20 minutes then something was clearly wrong - we don't have 20 minute line-ups even during our largest parties of the year. Also, no, we don’t have waiters, we never have. We are a tasting room, not a restaurant, not a pub. Part of the fun in visiting a brewery tasting room is to ask the staff questions, find out what’s new or different, try samples before committing to a beer, etc. That is most efficiently offered by having bar service, not table service. Yes, you have to wear a mask when coming to the bar for service and while waiting in line. That is a town bylaw that we adhere to strictly and always enforce. It’s for the safety of everyone.
To say that we are not cleaning anything and not adhering to COVID rules is untrue and is a serious allegation. We have drastically changed the way we run the tasting room in order to adhere to AHS rules and keep our staff and customers safe. We have installed barriers at the bar, our staff wear masks at all times when not behind the barrier, we sanitize the point-of-sale machine constantly, we have removed several tables from all three seating areas to provide social distancing (and thereby reduce our capacity). We clean and sanitize our washrooms and touchpoints very regularly through the day and try to clean and sanitize every table between each customer’s use.
Sometimes when it is busy and people are waiting someone grabs an empty table before our staff can get to it so it is not perfect. We ask customers to let us know if the table was missed and the staff would be happy get it ready for them. We have since introduced a system by which each table has a placard indicating whether it has been sanitized or not, so both our staff and customers know which tables need to be cleaned.
We would love to be able to hire enough staff so that every detail is instantly dealt with and no customer ever has to wait, but that is not practical. We can’t predict when customers will come to our tasting room and how one day may be well above average and the next not. Instead, we staff the tasting room appropriately for what our experience has shown us to expect for that day of the week. We are fortunate enough to have a business that customers truly love and recommend to their friends, so we can sometimes be very busy. As we grow, we add staff where required.
So, we're truly sorry you didn't have the experience you had hoped for and we'd like to make it right for you, however, in the future, please just chat with us directly before posting a negative review that is, for the most part, demonstrably untrue.