As BrewDog’s Rise and Fall Nears an Anticlimactic End, ‘Punks’ Are Left Holding the Bag
This past Saturday, Sky News reported that BrewDog had hired a bank to help it sell itself off, with the British broadcaster reporting the company’s board was hoping to set “a quickfire deadline for indicative offers” from would-be buyers.
Among the many questions this bombshell brewing-industry news has triggered, one looms large for your humble Hop Take columnist. What took so long?
Five years ago, a source contacted me about some ads he’d seen on Facebook. Invest in BrewDog, they told him. Become an Equity Punk today. Curious, he took a closer look at the Scottish craft brewery’s financial records. What he found — Regulation A stock offerings, private-equity investments, global subsidiaries — shocked him enough to pick up the phone.
Making sense of it all took several months of reporting and several thousand words to lay out in this mid-2021 report for VinePair. But the upshot was that BrewDog, the United Kingdom’s largest craft brewer, and then a recent entrant to the considerably more competitive United States market, would have to keep growing at an incredible rate and go public at an unheard-of valuation in order to keep its ~200,000 “Equity Punks” (read: retail investors) from getting hosed on collective investments that topped $100 million.
“It’s just a really bad situation for those punks,” my source, independent financial investor and researcher Ben Ostrow, told me at the time.
For years, it got worse. BrewDog lurched along from one scandal to the next, disillusioning true believers who had bought in — many, literally — to its loudly advertised “punk” ethos, headline-generating stunts, and the brash charisma of its co-founder and longtime chief executive, James Watt. There were accusations of workplace harassment, false advertising, and illegally imported kegs. Watt claimed BrewDog employees had engaged in criminal conspiracy to destroy him; to reveal the plot, he allegedly paid a Norwegian model $100,000 worth of Bitcoin, then sued her when she didn’t deliver the goods. Things got pretty weird. Eventually, TSG Partners — the U.S. private-equity firm that in 2017 bought ~22 percent of BrewDog for approximately £213 million — took more of an active interest in its floundering investment. Watt exited stage right to pursue his newfound passion for posting on LinkedIn; co-founder Martin Dickie abruptly announced his own departure in August of last year. As I wrote then:
For years, the co-founders were fond of referring to their brewery as the “Good Ship BrewDog,” but having steered it into heavy seas, they were forced to relinquish the helm to steadier hands. Now, both have headed for the lifeboats. Whether the souls aboard — workers, private-equity investors, and “punk” bagholders — find smoother sailing in their absence remains to be seen.
The horizon has gotten considerably darker since. The month following Dickie’s departure, BrewDog reported 1 percent annual sales growth and a full-year loss of over $40 million — its fifth consecutive frame in the red. In October 2025, it cut jobs; in January 2026, it announced the closure of its distillery in Aberdeen. No wonder its board is looking to the auction block.
In what has by now become a bit of a theme for BrewDog, the company’s workers learned about their employer’s latest scandal — a potential fire sale — not via internal communique, but the headlines. “This is people’s jobs, this is people’s rent, how they pay their bills and their childcare and yet they are being informed about the sale of their employer through the press,” Bryan Simpson, the hospitality lead for the U.K. union Unite, told the BBC. “That is morally unacceptable.”
A spokesperson for BrewDog declined to comment on that gaffe on the record, instead sending through a list of bullet points about the company and a brief statement describing the retention of the Michigan-based financial firm AlixPartners as “a deliberate and disciplined step with a focus on strengthening the long-term future of the BrewDog brand and its operations.”
It takes a flack’s paid-for delusion to put “deliberate and disciplined” in the same sentence as “BrewDog.” At the moment, “long-term future” feels like quite a reach, too, especially considering AlixPartners is a bona fide financial cleanup crew, having made its bones reorganizing near- or total corporate failures like General Motors and Enron, and assisting in restitution efforts in the aftermath of the Bernie Madoff scam. Not that BrewDog is a top-to-bottom sham, mind you. The beer is real; the breweries in Germany, Australia, and the United States (located outside of Columbus, Ohio), are real. Stateside, the firm is actually growing at a decent clip volume-wise, up from 73,000 barrels in 2023 to 89,000 barrels in 2025 per Brewers Association data. The brand is known the world over, if not loved. Founded in 2007, it’s one of the U.K.’s oldest craft outfits, and its 72 brewpubs across Europe, America, and Asia have functioned as way stations for innumerable English and English-speaking tourists and ex-pats over the years. In other words, for a while, this scheme was working. Watt and Dickie were talented marketers pitching damn-the-torpedos corporate rebellion one pint at a time, at a time when the mainstream press was thirsty for exactly that sort of story. They landed their own series on the bizarre, ill-fated Esquire television channel in 2013; in 2020, they bought a forest in Scotland and boasted the business would soon be carbon-negative. Their adoring legions of Equity Punks treated them like prophets, and ponied up accordingly.
But all the empire-building and self-mythologizing came at a dear price, in almost every sense. Financially, operationally, reputationally… you name it. BrewDog rose to international prominence at a moment when craft brewing felt like a movement, and that movement felt global. That feeling is gone here in the U.S., where BrewDog has become a top-50 volume player on the BA’s annual chart. The rest of the world, which took its cues from this country’s pioneering microbrewing segment, has tempered its enthusiasm apace. (The damage the Trump administration has done to America’s beer “brand” overseas probably hasn’t helped.) Straddling the seas for this sea change was BrewDog. With a decade and a half of juvenile stunts that were aging poorly, bold promises that had long since come due, and an increasingly radioactive CEO, the company was always going to have a tough time, in a much more crowded field, achieving the size of public listing that it had coyly teased for years. Whether it was the pandemic that shelved those plans, as Watt would claim, or the rising wariness among (actual, non-Punk) investors for craft breweries as the segment’s biggest market matured and some of the world’s biggest macrobrewers took haircuts on their acquisitions in the space is hard to say. Maybe a little Column A, and a little Column B.
But for BrewDog’s Equity Punks, Column C was always going to be a problem. Err, make that Preferred C, as in the class of shares that TSG Partners bought in 2017 that entitled it to a ludicrous compounding return of 18 percent annually. Even nine years ago, when Watt and Dickie were still finding adulating audiences for their anti-corporate schtick, smart money realized that this wildly ambitious company was reaching for the stars on some very rickety stilts, and secured its interests accordingly. Now, back-of-the-napkin math suggests TSG’s share of the proceeds from a BrewDog sale would be worth nearly $1.3 billion. Problem is, it’s unfathomable the brewer could command such a fee in 2026, let alone the already-delusional $2 billion-plus implied valuation at which it was still selling Punks shares as recently as 2021. The junk-jockeys at AlixPartners seem to know it, and are reportedly entertaining more of an everything-must-go approach. The Financial Times followed up on Sky News’s scoop, noting that the firm was considering deals for separate pieces of the business: “its brands, its brewing capacity and its pub estate.”
I text Ostrow, the source that first called me about BrewDog five years ago. “Never a good sign when your banker thinks you’ll get more value separating business lines that previously were pitched as synergistic,” he responds. Synergies: unachieved.
What will happen to BrewDog? The FT sketched out a scenario in which its production network went to a European macrobrewer and its pub network went to one of the U.K.’s on-premise giants, like the venerable Mitchells & Butlers. Or “private equity buyers could purchase the whole business,” reporter Robert Orr wrote, citing an unnamed source with knowledge of the sales proceedings. Sure, maybe.
Then there are the reports from U.K. media that Watt has been itching to return to the Good Ship BrewDog as it sinks — presumably to make it seaworthy again, rather than to go down with it like a captain should. “Mr[.] Watt, who remains one of BrewDog’s biggest shareholders, is now reportedly considering a bid to buy the company back, with sources indicating that he is canvassing support from financial backers,” Sky News noted. He and his new bride, Tory reality TV show fixture Georgia Toffolo, are reportedly worth over half a billion dollars together, and he remains BrewDog’s biggest shareholder. Again: sure, maybe.
Whatever happens, it will almost certainly be a bad situation for those poor Punks. Even if the jig isn’t up for BrewDog, it’s likely up for them. But hey — it’s not like no one tried to warn them.
🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now
What makes beer, well, beer? It’s a question that has vexed mankind from his — or her, shoutout to the alewives! — earliest days. Germany famously codified a detailed technical definition into law with the Reinheitsgebot; for purposes of raising revenues, governments around the world have at least enshrined functional descriptions in their tax codes. But much like the Ship of Theseus, the definitional locus of beer’s essence is tough to pinpoint. To wit: Heineken, a brewer of beer, makes Heineken 0.0, which in the eyes of this country’s Internal Revenue Service, is actually a nonalcoholic “malt beverage.” Now, it is rolling out new flavors of said brew — cold pressed lime and nectarine juniper, hitting shelves in March. Is that… beer? More importantly… does it even matter?
📈 Ups…
Tilray Brands inked a five-year deal with Carlsberg Group to brew the European firm’s beers stateside starting in 2027… Five craft beverage producers outta the first-wave hotbed of Bend have formed the Oregon Beverage Collective… Hard kombucha maker Jiant is moving into hard sodas and soft (?) hop tea with a newly closed round of fundraising…
📉 …and downs
The National Beer Wholesalers Association projected beer’s share-of-truck (?) falling from 76 percent in 2025 to 67 percent by 2030… The BA’s annual report is out and looking rough, with revenue down almost 25 percent… Molson Coors took a beating in 2025, posting -8.6 percent shipments and -4.8 percent net sales…
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