Lars Olson

Review of Surly Brewing Co.

IF YOU ARE PLANNING AN EVENT AT SURLY PLEASE READ!...

IF YOU ARE PLANNING AN EVENT AT SURLY PLEASE READ!!! ESPECIALLY IF YOU ARE GETTING MARRIED.
We met Katie and she was charming and said Surly would bend over backwards to make our wedding special. We quickly paid the $1000 to secure our reservation. It started with the tasting. My wife and I both took the day off work to be there on a weekday. When we got to Surly it was more of a corporate offering with chicken fingers etc. We had already told them that we wanted a plated dinner. No plated options were available for tasting.They had 3 of the 8 plated options displayed so we could see what they would look like. If we can t eat it, why only 3 of the 8 available options? "Too expensive to make", they said. After complaining we were able to set up a private tasting on a Saturday. Being taken advantage of without advocating for yourself was a pattern the whole time we worked with Surly.My Texas wife wanted sweet tea. Surly told us they would provide us un-sweet tea and If their distributor could get it they would provide sweetener AKA Simple Syrup. For 40 DOLLARS PER GALLON. for unsweet tea We wanted different chairs. Katie said we could drop them off Friday for the Saturday ceremony. She told the chair company that they could only be dropped off on Saturday. We had to advocate for ourselves to get them Friday as previously planned. We had trouble with security. My wife arrived at Surly right before the ceremony for her grand entrance. Security tried to stop my wife from entering without her id. One of her bridesmaids told security that the wedding had started before they were allowed to enter. Later my brother went downstairs to see if the getaway car had arrived. Security watched him walk out, and then wouldn t let him reenter without showing his id. They marked his hand so he couldn t drink. He gave them his id for them to hold onto since he was in a hurry. Ten minutes later he came back downstairs to get his ID and the same security guy acted like he had no idea who he was and demanded he give his full name DOB so he could identify him. He did and the guy pulled his id out of his pocket without even looking at it. My brother was in a suit and had a boutonniere on. There are lights on the fermentation tanks. You can see them from the event space. It costs extra to have those colored lights changed. It also costs extra to use their projector screen.We didn t want the screen. We told them that. We did want the lights changed from hideous blue to a more neutral color. The day of the wedding both of these were broken. The screen was down during the entire ceremony. My wife s mother tried to get Surly staff to put the screen up before the ceremony, and Katie told her not to worry about it, but she never actually fixed it. They told us it was broken only after we complained about it. After this complaint we never saw Katie again.The screen was up during the reception, but somehow broken during the ceremony? We don't know why the screen was down in the first place. We had a rehearsal the day before the wedding and the screen was up as planned.
Surly, and especially Katie, never ceased to amaze me with their ineptitude. She would smile and say Ok! My pleasure! Whatever you want! and never ever delivered. I don t really care that I had to take off work to not try any food that we were offered. I didn t mind not having sweet tea because it was so overpriced.
I CARE THAT EVERY SINGLE PICTURE THAT WAS TAKEN OF MY CEREMONY IS UNFRAMEABLE OR USABLE IN ANY WAY. Every picture of my beautiful wife on our special day is ruined. It looks like a green screen from a behind-the-scenes comic book movie photo. It is all you can see in the pictures, WE HAD A LOT OF PICTURES. $4,000 dollars for a wedding photographer and it was all for nothing because Surly broke the projector screen on the day of my wedding.
We just got our pictures back. I am so disappointed.