The founders of Citizen Cider made a clear distinction when they launched their first alcoholic beverage a dozen years ago: They weren’t a beer company, and their product wasn’t like beer.

They compared their apple-based fermented cider to wine and emphasized its appeal to every type of person, every citizen.

That distinction shifted in June, when Citizen Cider released Hey Bub, a light beer sold in red-and-gold cans with a depiction of a guy on a lawn mower. The company hosted a Bub Fest launch party at its Burlington pub and hung a giant “Hey Bub” banner off the balcony.



It was a classic case of product diversification. Using existing equipment and distribution channels, the company veered into a new area of business to attract different customers. Unlike other new products Citizen Cider has introduced, such as hard seltzer and nonalcoholic cider, the company makes no mention of Hey Bub on its website or social media pages and issued no announcement to the media about its release. Hey Bub has its own website, Instagram account and proletarian ideology, favoring the motto “Keep it light.”

Citizen Cider’s foray into the beer business did not go down smoothly with some of its staff, particularly those working in the Pine Street restaurant and taproom, which sells Hey Bub alongside Citizen’s array of ciders. More than a dozen employees across the company have left Citizen Cider in recent weeks, many citing incidents related to the Hey Bub release and what they view as its offensive marketing.
Several of those employees, as well as some past Citizen Cider workers, spoke to Seven Days about their frustrations with the company. It wasn’t the beer itself or the reduced attention to cider that upset them. It was how Citizen Cider’s leadership opted to sell the beer — with messaging and methods that they considered narrow-minded at best and misogynistic and homophobic at worst, they said.

“They made very clear efforts to make sure that the beer is marketed to a very specific group of people,” one former employee said. “They have made it exclusive instead of inclusive.”

That specific group, according to several employees: straight, white, blue-collar men.

The Hey Bub upheaval illustrates the challenges for companies that shift their culture to reach different audiences than the customers they traditionally courted. That was the hard-earned lesson for brewer Anheuser-Busch this spring after it engaged an Instagram influencer, a transgender woman, to promote Bud Light. Vocal and viral backlash among the brand’s conservative drinkers followed, leading to a drop in sales. The beer company then walked back its trans-accepting promotion in favor of an ad campaign focused on football and country music.

Justin Heilenbach, president and cofounder of Citizen Cider, said the creation of Hey Bub involved “input from employees across the spectrum of the company, and we looked at it as our most collaborative beverage development project to date.”

He attributed the internal hubbub to “the power of miscommunication” and added, “In the absence of good communication, people can draw a lot of assumptions about one another that aren't true.”

Most of the Citizen Cider workers interviewed by Seven Days asked to remain anonymous, saying they worry that their candor or complaints could taint their standing in new positions or their future job prospects. Since they began speaking with the newspaper, a Reddit post about the commotion at the company has been shared widely on social media.

The turmoil started soon after Citizen Cider started selling Hey Bub. During LGBTQ Pride Month in June, the pub staff — mostly women, many who identify as lesbian, queer, trans or gender-nonconforming — decorated its chalkboard of weekly food and drink specials with rainbow colors and Pride messages.

“Happy Pride Y’all,” read one brightly lettered message on the specials board. “Now pouring: Hey Bub lite beer made here!” Underneath that, the board advertised the “Sloshie of the Gay,” for the week’s special frozen slush drink. Rainbows lined the bottom of the sign.

By the next day, someone had erased the board, several employees told Seven Days. Pub staff redrew the rainbow designs on the board, along with the Hey Bub message, and it was wiped away again.

Citizen Cider leaders told staff that they wanted promotion of Hey Bub to remain “neutral,” several former employees told Seven Days. A few employees said they overheard a Citizen Cider director tell someone, “We can’t have that shit” associated with Hey Bub, referring to the Pride messages on the taproom chalkboard.



Megan Maher, former general manager of the Citizen Cider restaurant, met with the company’s owners and other leaders.

“We have a lot of queer staff here, and it felt like you were really trying to erase us from your brand,” she recalled telling them. “I don't understand why this company, whose values were founded on ‘cider for everyone, cider for the people,’ all of a sudden you have a brand that's now excluding entire groups of people. And you're asking queer people to sell it.”

Heilenbach disputed that anyone at the company disparaged the LGBTQ community. “We would never tolerate that kind of behavior, because we value all communities, including LGBTQ,” he said.

The tension at Citizen Cider escalated with Bub Fest on July 13. According to several employees, Heilenbach and other company leaders wanted pub staff to wear Hey Bub T-shirts with suggestive phrases on the back. One showed a man riding a mower and hoisting a red beer can under the words “Keep It Trimmed.” Another depicted a man on a tractor with the phrase “Get Plowed.” A third read “Approved for Hooking Up” alongside an image of a man fishing.

Most employees Seven Days spoke to said they viewed “Keep It Trimmed” as a reference to women’s pubic hair. "Get plowed" and “hooking up” commonly refer to a sexual encounter.

Many of the Citizen staff, particularly young female servers, told their manager that they were uncomfortable wearing the shirts. Two young servers told Seven Days that they regularly deal with male customers who call them “sweetie” or touch them without permission.

“They come in and get drunk,” one of the servers said. “And then you have these girls wearing these shirts — it creates just this really toxic environment.”

Mo Cummings, a former Citizen Cider bartender who worked during Bub Fest, loudly protested and refused to wear the shirt, she said during an interview a few weeks after the event. Bub Fest attendees could buy the T-shirts, and Cummings scoffed at some who did.

Before Bub Fest began, Maher and another Citizen Cider manager found plain T-shirts and hurried to Michaels craft store for supplies to iron on the Hey Bub logo. The pub staff wore those instead of the original slogans.

In an email response to questions from Seven Days, Heilenbach wrote that the marketing team created “puns” to match the images on the T-shirts, and employees were under no obligation to wear them. They could choose any clothing or other method to promote Hey Bub, he wrote.

But the incident left a bad taste among the pub staff, several workers said. Some told Seven Days they feared they’d lose their jobs if they voiced their displeasure.

A few days later, Cummings, who identifies as queer, was fired and told the reason was her “bad attitude at Bub Fest,” she said. Heilenbach said Cummings lost her job because of “performance issues.”

Hey Bub is hardly the first U.S. brand to promote beer via sexual innuendo and references to drunken behavior. But several Citizen employees said alcoholic beverage companies need to respond to heightened awareness and sensitivity to sexual assault and harassment of women in the post-#MeToo era.

“This is 2023,” Cummings said. “You don't need to put fucking sexually harassing words on your shirt to sell your beer.”

From its inception, Citizen Cider took a different approach with its cider, embracing slogans such as “Be a Good Citizen.” Several workers from various positions in the company said they joined the staff there because of the company’s “good vibes,” as one put it, citing its commitment to sourcing from local apple orchards and its attitude of tolerance.

Last year, in honor of Pride Month, Citizen released Spill the Tea, a green tea-infused cider in a can with a psychedelic design of a face adorned with elaborate eye makeup, as an homage to drag queens.

According to a product description on Citizen's website, Spill the Tea is a "celebration of inclusivity, passion, and pride; made by the people and made for everyone!"

“We never talked about inclusivity in the workplace as much as we did about inclusivity of cider, and that's what makes cider different, and that cider is for everyone,” one employee said. “If you look at a lot of Citizen’s branding, it has a lot of that ‘cider is for everyone.’”

Companies build their marketing on those “intangibles” — attitudes and emotional connections that customers associate with a brand as much as they do with the product itself, said Mike Kallenberger, a beverage industry marketing consultant and brand expert at First Key Consulting. Based in the Milwaukee area, he is a past instructor for the Business of Craft Beer continuing education course at the University of Vermont. It’s “risky” for a company to veer away from its principles, even when diversifying with a different product, he added.

“Most companies have some core values,” Kallenberger said. “Those core values of the company should hold throughout” the release of new products.

In his email responses, Heilenbach wrote that Citizen Cider’s values haven’t changed.

“Our commitment to inclusivity and support of the LGBTQ community is unwavering and has been since we started this company,” he wrote. “Any feedback our employees have expressed to us is heard and we have had an open and honest discussion about it.”

Heilenbach founded Citizen Cider in 2011 with partners Bryan Holmes and Kris Nelson. Holmes is the company’s vice president of product development, and Nelson remains an owner but is no longer involved in day-to-day operations, Heilenbach said.
They began pressing and selling their first beverage, Unified Press, out of a tasting room in Fort Ethan Allen in Essex. The Burlington pub opened in 2014 on Pine Street, where the company now has its offices. Citizen Cider moved much of its production to a site on Flynn Avenue in 2017.

Heilenbach declined to provide current employee numbers at Citizen Cider, citing a company policy against disclosing internal information. In December 2020, the Burlington Free Press reported that the company had 55 employees, down from 90 pre-pandemic.

Since its founding, the company has launched multiple new products, including hard seltzer, ready-to-drink cocktails and a nonalcoholic line of cider called All Times.

About two years ago, Citizen Cider began co-packing — manufacturing and packaging smaller companies’ products — for a local microbrewery, which Heilenbach declined to identify. The cider production operation had all the equipment necessary to make craft beer, other than a brewhouse, which Citizen Cider installed in early 2022, Heilenbach said. Citizen’s team worked with its co-packing partner on its recipes, then began to tinker with a beer formula of its own.

The brewers saw a “void in the market for an affordable light beer, made locally,” Heilenbach wrote in his email. “Hey Bub is unique in that it is made within the craft industry but in a style that is quite uncommon in that market.”

Zero Gravity may disagree. The Burlington craft brewery released McLighty’s Light Lager last year as “the best light beer you’ve never heard of ... from the Green Mountains of Vermont.”

Nationwide, cider sales have softened, ending 2022 with a 9.8 percent drop to $536.5 million, according to market research firm NielsenIQ. Craft cider brewers, though, offset that trend with a 5.7 percent increase.

Citizen’s sales remain strong and had nothing to do with the decision to add Hey Bub, Heilenbach said. He declined to provide specific figures.

“Truly the reasons for diversifying our product line are to reach a wider variety of consumers, hopefully bring new consumers to try our current products, and to keep the work interesting,” he wrote.

The beer, which sells in a 12-pack for $13.99 at City Market and is widely available in Burlington, has received a good response in its two months on the market, Heilenbach wrote: “There is a lot of price fatigue and flavor fatigue right now and Hey Bub checks both boxes in terms of what many customers are searching for on the shelf.”

However, concern about the internal strife at the company has prompted Carina Driscoll to take Citizen’s canned ciders and hard seltzers off the menu at her Burlington restaurant, Butter Bar & Kitchen, she said. A customer had asked for a cider other than Citizen’s and mentioned the employee uproar, Driscoll told Seven Days.

“We've pulled it for the time being, until we understand more,” Driscoll said. “But it's a no-brainer to support workers who are asking their company culture to shift and get with the times.”

The separate marketing for Hey Bub grew out of Citizen Cider’s attempt to break into a new niche, Heilenbach said. In the beverage industry today, companies no longer define themselves by one type of product, he said.

“The concept of categories being really distinct is sort of antiquated, that if you make beer, you're just a brewery; you make wine, you're just a winery; you make cider, you’re just a cidery,” he said. “If you look at the broader landscape of beverage in 2023, those subcategories have kind of lost their definition.”
But the divergent personalities of Citizen’s cider and beer are exactly what led to the strain in Citizen Cider’s workforce.

“It’s not the inclusive vibe that Citizen Cider, what they say they’re about,” one of the former pub servers said of Hey Bub. “All of us who work there came to work for Citizen Cider.”