Six Hills Brewing: 'Living in this country has been snatched away from me'
An EU citizen claims she worked below minimum wage, long hours without breaks and was then dismissed without good reason at a Stevenage brewery
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Six Hills Brewery deny any wrongdoing claiming they always pay their employees at least minimum wage, adhere to employment law, on training and working hours, weren’t made aware that help or breaks were needed and tried to resolve the employee’s concerns. Their full comment is at the bottom of the article.
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This article is from the perspective of Noora Koskinen-Dini who has recently been dismissed by Six Hills Brewing in Stevenage, Hertfordshire. Her story shows how difficult it is to work in beer as an EU citizen in this country and how she now faces an uncertain future. If you can help her turn her life around then please get in touch. Otherwise I’ll hand over this week’s Substack to Noora…
I fell in love with beer when I was in Germany as a student aged sixteen in 2001 - then you could buy beer at that age, which wasn’t the case back home in Finland. It was really exciting.
I did a brewing course which gave a 360-degree overview of the industry - production to marketing, ingredients to working behind the bar.
In 2013, I came here with a back-pack and found a job in two weeks which is so much different to now. Four years later - after Brexit - we moved to Italy and we came back to London in January 2023. My husband and I felt it was the right place to return to - it felt like home for both of us.
Our plan - and it still is - is go through the Visa period, get leave to remain and eventually get citizenship and stay. It’s a massive investment to come here and people don’t know what a huge achievement it is to have a Visa.
One of my best friends is from Stevenage and we met up during our time in Italy. In May 2022, she showed me the Hertfordshire town and told me about this little craft brewery called Six Hills. I wrote an email to Paul Clinton, the owner of Six Hills, introducing myself and I visited the brewery and we had a two-hour conversation.
I told him that I was living in Italy and asked him how easy it was to get a Visa because I didn’t really know. He said if I was ‘willing to be flexible with my role’ a Visa wouldn’t be a problem and we left it there. It was a lovely conversation.
An hour after I left the brewery, I got a message from Paul saying ‘if you’re thinking of applying for a job in London, consider us first’. It seemed like a job offer and Six Hills did the Home Office application to gain a sponsorship licence.
My intention was never to go to the brewery and ask for a job - it was to just have a chat about the beer. I started working there 3 January 2023 and at the time I genuinely thought they did this because of who I am and what I could offer the business especially because I had done a brewing course.
I thought they wanted me because I was passionate about beer but I don’t think - in hindsight - this was the agenda they may have had in their minds despite what they told me on Zoom calls before I left for the UK. They told me on these pre-employment calls they wanted me to manage the bar and then take over the brewing side.
To change my life and come to London, I needed incentives like the ones that were being discussed. Also being a certain age - 37 years old at the time - I wanted to consider my career and I was feeling like I was on a high.
Working in a brewery as a woman was an exciting prospect because it was different and I thought it was a great opportunity for me and my husband - who also works in hospitality. I even saw us working together at some point.
When I arrived there was a general manager who worked with me to show me how things were run in the taproom - it didn’t include the brewery because this was Paul’s domain.
I didn’t enjoy working there and I felt it was not what Paul had explained it would be like. I worked mainly at the taproom, there was no brewery work, not even shadowing. It was mainly serving but because I worked on my own, there was cellar management too.
I felt like you were expected to do everything. It was a big change living in the UK - you move your life to a new place - and I was trying to organise everything while working. It then hit me: ‘hang on a minute, I’m just literally serving beer’.
I spoke to the general manager who I got on well with and he listened but he eventually left in December 2023.
We had worked together for a year but now things got even worse. It felt more chaotic and I now dealt directly with the owners [Paul and his wife, Marie]. It was just me and the owners working in the taproom and brewery.
I begged them to employ someone else in case I was sick but they said they wanted to save money. I worked on my own in the taproom when it was so busy I didn’t have time to go to the toilet.
There was one Friday with one group of 20 young people and in total there would’ve been over 50 people in a very small taproom. They hired a guy a few months later [to help when I wasn’t working at the taproom] but I was still on my own until August on Fridays and from 2pm till close - I even had to do post-shift cleaning by myself.
The owner, Paul, would sit there and occasionally help out for a moment if it got really busy by collecting glasses but I was on my own 99% of the time and never given a lunch break - I had to eat my own food in front of customers.
During this time I believe I worked more than 45 hours a week and I think I would’ve been paid under the minimum wage. Nobody would stay and help me clean afterwards. There was no training, no performance reviews, no management. I stuck with this because I loved the customers in the taproom and we were part of a community where I felt fostered and loved.
I felt the brewery owners left me to it because I was a dedicated employee - if something needed doing I would stay and finish it, that’s who I am and I had never taken a day off sick despite the hours and conditions. There was even an occasion where I was asked to keep the bar open longer because it was busy but I protested because I had already worked nine hours without a break.
I wasn't brewing on Mondays and Tuesdays, which was promised. So I pestered Paul and he allowed me to shadow him but I felt he did so very reluctantly. Eventually I convinced him that I could do it and by December 2023 I was running the whole production on my own until November 2024.
On Mondays I was packaging, cleaning and preparing for the brew day and Tuesdays was the actual brewing and cleaning. The rest of the week I was working in the taproom.
In November, I had an issue with two batches of pale ale that were oxidised - nothing like this had happened before and the beer had already been packaged. I follow the same process with each brew so I narrowed down the issue, locating where the air was being leaked in.
After a few conversations, Paul suspended brewing via text message. After that I was given random tasks to do in the brewery and shortly after I organised a meeting with him because I told him the new employees in the taproom felt unhappy, neglected and untrained but I felt these concerns were being ignored.
I was the taproom manager but it wasn’t clear who was managing whom. In this meeting I was accused of not being good at problem solving but I stayed firm and asked for a clearer decision-making process. Ten days later I was summoned to another meeting where Paul told me ‘because you’re unhappy and you can’t buy the brewery I’m going to let you go’.
I felt this was rambling nonsense and not how you do things. After all this time, after all this love and passion, my employment was terminated because someone thought I was unhappy? I tried to explain the consequences of this decision that it would affect my whole family and it meant I would have to ultimately leave the UK.
I worked there a month afterwards leaving at the end of December as if nothing had happened. It was very raw for me - it was really difficult for me to talk about it but I finished the month with dignity without bad-mouthing the brewery. I believe they sacked me because I was about to be there for more than two years and I would’ve had more employment rights.
I feel hopeless now that someone could just snatch something away - whether it be a job, a city or a country. We enjoyed being back in the UK but I have to have a certain wage, the hiring company has to be registered with the Home Office and has to have a licence to sponsor non-British employees.
All these factors have to be in place under post-Brexit regulations for me to be able to legally stay here - so I can’t just work at my local and serve pints.
This situation has put me off working again in beer - and I’ve lost some of the passion I had. But I think to the Finnish brewery, Coolhead Brew, where I did my training - they were amazing with me. If I could have that again and stay in London - that would be my dream.
Six Hills Brewing said: “We believe we have always paid our employees at least minimum wage. As the matter is still an open issue between us and the worker's union representative, we won't comment any further.
We sponsored the employee as a bar manager initially on a 45-hour per-week basis. It is our position that this changed in May 2024 to a 41-hour week, which is disputed by the employee. At no time did the employee say that they were working in excess of these agreed hours, and at no time did they request breaks which were refused.
In the first year of their employment, they and our other full-time employee alternated the brewing duties. When the employee in question solely took over the brewing, they were producing on average 500 litres of beer every other week, and were given 8-hour shifts every Monday and Tuesday to brew, package, and clean the brewery. As you can tell from the output, the brewing side of the business is a one-person operation and cannot support additional brewing staff.
On the taproom side, the majority of shifts only justify one person but we rota on where possible a cross over of shifts for busy periods (Friday and Saturday evenings, bank holiday Sundays, and other days where historically we are likely to be busy). If there is only one person on shift and it gets busy, staff can always contact us for support as we only live five minutes away. The only exception would be if we were away. If the employee didn't message us for support if they felt under pressure, it's because they chose not to.
All staff in their first few shifts are trained on our Safer Food, Better Business processes and procedures, our fire safety, and our systems. Additionally, the employee was trained to operate our brewery equipment. As a small family business we do not have an HR department but the employee always knew who their line manager was.
In the months leading up to their departure we had numerous meetings with them, but it became clear that there was nothing we could do to make them happy in our workplace and that it was best for all concerned to part ways. This decision was not taken lightly or rashly as we were aware of the visa difficulties this could cause them and their spouse. At no time during those discussions did they say that the reason they weren't happy was because they were working mainly on their own, and this issue has only been raised with us now, but in any event it's hard to see how we could have resolved this given the demands of the business.”