A Port Moody brewery may have been a little foolhardy when it recently served a customer.
Brave Brewing has been fined $7,000 for supplying liquor to a minor.
But a co-owner of the brewery said it will appeal the decision.
Chris Backus, who's also Brave's general manager, said the method used by the Liquor and Cannabis Regulation Branch uses to test compliance of the province's liquor laws against serving minors is "overzealous trickery rather than fair testing."
Backus said "nobody in the industry and Brave brewery supports the service of alcohol to minors."
According to a decision April 19, an inspector and 18-year-old minor agent visited Brave on Jan. 4.
With the inspector watching from nearby, the minor agent was able to buy a single can of beer and exit the premises.
The inspector then located the manager who was informed an infraction of the Liquor Control and Licensing Act had occurred.
At a hearing conducted April 10, the clerk, who uses sign language to communicate, testified while the brewery has a policy to request ID from anyone who looks younger than 30 years old, he did not ask the minor agent for ID because he said she looked older than 30, with baggy pants, messy hair and glasses. He also said it was midday and young people aren’t normally patronizing the brewery at that time.
The clerk told the hearing while he had received training to ask for ID and the kinds of ID that are appropriate, he hadn’t had the occasion to record any sort of refusal of service for ID insufficiency or intoxication into the brewery’s incident logbook since he’d started training to work as a server in September 2023.
He said the importance of asking for ID from customers suspected of being younger than 30 came up a few times during staff meetings.
While Brave Brewing argued it had exercised its due diligence to ensure alcohol isn’t being sold to minors, including weekly staff meetings to review procedures and responsibilities, the regulator said the employee’s training wasn’t vigorous enough as it hadn’t been supported by written training programs or quizzes addressing liquor service issues.
As well, said the regulator, there was no evidence the brewery consistently communicated with its employees over issues like requesting ID.
“It appears that the licensee relied largely on the fact that the employee had a SIR (Serve It Right) certificate,” the decision reads, which acknowledged there was no previous contravention of liquor regulations at Brave in the previous 12 months.
Under the law, licensed establishments face a minimum fine of $7,000 or seven-day suspension for a first offence.
