I spent last weekend fleeing from the heat of London for what I thought would be the misty cool of Aberdeen. In the event it was still 21 degrees with the sun shining brightly - still much more reasonable, but for Aberdonians something of a heat wave. I spent Saturday in Hazlehead Park with 10,000 BrewDog Equity Punks. My reflections on that to follow shortly. But first, for those of you who need it, a short intro to BrewDog that I penned before the weekend.
The history of Brewdog is fraught with controversy, so let’s try to boil it down to the facts. It was founded by James Watt and Martin Dickie, both aged 24, in 2007. Dickie previously worked at Thornbridge and was involved in the development of Jaipur IPA (so far, so very good). Their first brewery was in Fraserburgh on the Aberdeenshire north coast. They started exporting to Sweden, Japan and the US. They opened their first bar in Aberdeen in 2009. They opened bars in Edinburgh, Glasgow and London in 2011. They moved to a larger brewery site at Ellon in 2012. They have won various awards for entrepreneurship and beer over the years.
From the beginning, they adopted the “punk” branding, which meant that controversy was part of their MO. Their website gives their founding motivation as being “fed up with the stuffy beer market” and their initial activity as brewing “hardcore craft beer”. Their marketing was, let’s say, a little attention seeking. Their London bar was heralded with the driving of some form of armed vehicle down Camden High Street (they called it a “tank”; various military experts have been nit-picking ever since). They sought to have “the strongest beer in the world” on their roster at various points, including a memorable episode when they sold a 55% ABV (yes, 55, I didn’t forget the decimal point) beer inserted in the skin of a stuffed wild animal.
When this is your strategy, you positively relish the making of enemies. First in line was the Portman Group, a very worthy group of people who try to regulate alcohol advertising to avoid alcohol sounding too much fun. They have twelve things that they don’t like in terms of advertising. For example, it must not appeal to under 18s, nor imply that alcohol will make you popular or get you laid. Well, they spent much of 2008 having a go at Brewdog. The “decisions” section of their website records blandly and briefly that they eventually exonerated the marketing for Punk IPA (“aggressive beer”) of encouraging anti-social behaviour. Watt and Dickie decided to double down. Having lambasted the Portman Group for being funded by and in the pockets of the incumbents, they briefly released a new beer called Speedball (i.e. the drug cocktail) with the comment that “we thought we would give them something worth banning us for”). The skirmishes continued over the years, culminating in Brewdog’s “Pink IPA (Beer for Girls)” for International Women’s Day. Watt and Dickie cheerfully admitted afterwards that the irony in the sexism hadn’t quite cut through and that it had therefore been a mistake. The Portman Group condemned them on the basis that the “girls” that it was aimed at were defined in the dictionary as “non-adult females”. Brewdog replied that “we’re as bothered about this Portman Group ruling as we are about the others - i.e. not at all”.
Brewdog actively sought to wind up the big corporates whom they accused of being behind the Portman Group. Diageo took the bait in 2012 when a senior member of staff was caught telling the Scottish Institute of Innkeeping that sponsorship would be withdrawn if Brewdog won the Bar Keeper of the Year Award (Diageo threw the individual under a bus and grovelled). Then came the very punk moment when Brewdog posted on Twitter a video showing Camden Brewery being removed from their bar menus - the individual letters dropped on the floor - after Camden were acquired by the devil in the form of AB Inbev. (It is not recorded whether AB Inbev noticed or cared).
But above all, step forward Colin Valentine, past chairman of the Campaign for Real Ale. Mr Valentine (possibly fortified by a couple of real ales too many) went off on one big time at the 2011 CAMRA AGM. He castigated the “bloggerati” for undermining the cause of the one true real ale by calling for the embrace of craft ale, which was basically just the evil keg that CAMRA had set itself against. Brewdog rubbed their hands in glee. Sensible voices in the beer community queued up to say that Valentine, and by extension CAMRA, had lost it in their failure to realise that it was no longer 1971. As I mentioned last time, there followed an attempted reconciliation around Brewdog’s planned attendance at that year’s Great British Beer Festival… which broke down in acrimony and mutual recriminations.
Valentine stepped down in 2018, with a resounding statement that included the words: “Some people have said that ‘he’s retiring because he’s f-ed the CAMRA Revitalisation Project’... but nothing could be further from the truth”. I hope that clears it up.
In unrelated news, the same issue of the trade paper that reported Valentine’s statement included a news item on how CAMRA had been obliged to apologise for a crossword that included the clues “US negro could become an operational doctor” and “sex toy or effeminate man”. CAMRA’s modernisation remained a work in progress.
But back to Brewdog. They have been very lucky in their enemies. But as they went from strength to strength, the spotlight began to turn onto them in ways that were less welcome. In June 2021, a group of former employees called “Punks with Purpose” published an open letter lambasting what they saw as the toxic culture inside the company. It referred to a “cult of personality” and addressed Watt directly (“James, it is with you that the responsibility for this rotten culture lies”) https://www.punkswithpurpose.org/dearbrewdog/
Brewdog had the honour of being skewered in Private Eye, who printed a satirical ad for a Brewdog “Shut the F-k up or you’re Fired IPA”. Watt published a reply in which he admitted that mistakes had been made along the way. Some saw this as a bit “sorry not sorry”, and perceived a parallel campaign to discredit Punks with Purpose.
Full disclosure: I purchased some Brewdog shares through the Equity for Punks scheme a couple of years ago. Getting it slightly the wrong way round, having done so I sought online advice on whether this was a good idea. Many people have done as I have, riding a wave of enthusiasm and optimism for the brand. Let’s just say that there is a degree of scepticism in the market regarding whether the Equity Punks will ever get their money back - let alone make big gains - even if Brewdog floats successfully as it has been “just on the point of doing” for a few years.
I will give the last word to an interview conducted by Watt with Jon Henley of the Guardian in 2016. Watt told Henley:
“Everything is about the beer. Everything. We want to make people as passionate about great beer as we are. Change perceptions, challenge conventions, but do it on our terms. We’ve always said we’ll either succeed, or be some massive great crash-and-burn failure. But that’s fine, because the space in between is really fucking boring.”
So what about the beer? Brewdog make some very good beers. I have some Punk and some Gale in my fridge at the moment. I like Hazy Jane. I love the Duopolis Oat Cream IPA. I like offering the likes of “Zombie Cake” and “Mallow Laser Quest” for pudding.
The comments below the line on Henley’s article included some trenchant assertions that other breweries make better stuff with less hype. True, but does that invalidate Brewdog? I don’t think so. If James Watt was challenging to work for - and for some people (not all) he clearly was - then that’s another thing.
“[Brewdog’s] overheated rhetoric”, concluded Henley, “is just the thing that gets Dickie and Watt called pretentious hipster douchebags on the internet. But BrewDog’s astonishing growth may raise the uncomfortable possibility that in an age of media-savvy and brand-sceptical digital natives, ostentatious displays of “authenticity” – known to some as acting like pretentious hipster douchebags – may have become a necessary condition for success.”
I don’t think I can improve on that.