Samuel Adams Brewery Workers Declare Intent to Unionize

(Photo: AP Photo/Charles Krupa)

Workers at the Sam Adams Boston Brewery in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, have delivered a letter declaring their intent to unionize. Reports indicate that the staff consists of bartenders, beer ambassadors, cooks and key holders organizing for “job security, equitable treatment, equality, clear & consistent policies and clearly defined wages & benefits.”

“If you’re talking to management over and over and over again and nothing’s changing, you’ve got to try something different,” Zafi Smith, a senior beer ambassador at Sam Adams, told the UFCW Local 328 News. “Seeing my coworkers reinvigorated by this has been incredible.”

The Jamaica Plain brewery was the first commercial home of the Boston Beer Company when it switched from contract brewing to in-house production in 1987.

It was the beginning of an empire. Over the decades, the company expanded from Samuel Adams to malt-based best sellers like Twisted Tea, Angry Orchard and Truly Hard Seltzer, eventually outgrowing the limited capabilities of its original facility. Nowadays, Jamaica Plain primarily serves as a small-batch research, development and pilot brewery at which tourists and locals can partake in guided tours.

Production employees are reportedly not included in the proposed union, though it’s unclear if many work at Jamaica Plain to begin with.

The bulk of Samuel Adams beer is produced at company-owned breweries in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania, the latter of which is not unionized. The Ohio location, however, inherited union workers when Boston Beer acquired the facility from Hudepohl-Schoenling in 1997.

Organizers claim that the Boston Beer Company has had an adversarial relationship with unions. In February 2025, Teamsters Local 1199 filed unfair labor practice charges against the brewing juggernaut, claiming that newly recruited workers weren’t being offered the same raises and working conditions as their senior counterparts.

“Boston Beer Company is dragging its feet, and Teamsters won’t tolerate it,” Randy Verst, President of Local 1199, declared in a public statement. “These workers are responsible for the success of these brands. This company owes them the simple respect of meeting for contract negotiations.”

The Boston Beer Company has not taken an official anti-union stance and insists that it has always bargained in good faith. In his bestselling 2016 memoir “Quench Your Thirst: Business Lessons Learned Over a Beer or Two,” CEO and co-founder Jim Koch was friendly to the idea of union organizing, adding that employees at the Cincinnati brewery were “well-meaning, hardworking people.”

“A typical buy-out company might have shut Hudepohl-Schoenling, let go of all the union workers, and hired new, nonunion workers before reopening,” Koch wrote. “We weren’t about to do that. Having worked during college as a low-level employee in factories, I’d learned that there are good unions and bad unions, just like there are good bosses and bad bosses.

The company has not issued a public statement about the unionization effort in Jamaica Plain. It is not known how many workers are employed at the facility, though third-party estimates peg the figure between 75 and 100.