Punk. Elvis Juice. Hazy Jane. Wingman. Malt Fiction. Loopy Monk. In 2007, Scotsmen James Watt and Martin Dickie based BrewDog with a easy objective: stick two fingers up on the stuffy, supercilious world of Massive Beer by making a number of the most unquaffable booze in all of Christendom. And for a lot of the early 2010s they actually did seize a selected millennial zeitgeist, because the aesthetic as soon as lazily branded as “hipster” – the beards, the Black Keys, the BBQ pulled pork – ingrained its Crimson Wing boots firmly into the British public’s psyche.
Publish-recession, the normal English pub, with its sticky, patterned carpets, plush ruby crimson banquettes, and intimate, convivial environment was on the best way out (a whopping 1,973 institutions closed within the yr following the monetary crash). What adopted was a reshaping of the general public home itself, with BrewDog on the darkish coronary heart of it. Abruptly, uncovered brick, industrial air flow shafts, and harsh lighting grew to become de rigueur, as pubs turned from welcoming third areas, which frequently felt like extensions of somebody’s entrance room, into experiential holding pens; locations the place the deep nidor of sticky wings and dragon fries combined with the stale odor of spilled cloudy IPAs. The chairs had been uncomfortable, the drinks had been costly, and the branding was very a lot a spotlight group’s concept of hip.
BrewDog at all times claimed to do issues in a different way. Its headline initiative was Fairness for Punks, a crowdfunding scheme which allowed common previous pintmen such as you and me to turn into shareholders within the firm (the Financial Times recently suggested that except a purchaser is available in with a mammoth supply for BrewDog quickly, the shares offered to its 130,000 “fairness punks” might be “nugatory”). They drove a tank down Camden Excessive Avenue, and decried “tasteless, apathetic, fizzy mainstream lagers produced by big international breweries” (leaked emails from 2018 present that Watt was open to a partial sale to Heineken, although it didn’t find yourself occurring). Watt and Dickie projected themselves bare on to the Homes of Parliament, for some motive.
This week, BrewDog introduced the approaching closure of ten of their public homes – together with their Aberdeen flagship and three London websites – citing “ongoing business challenges”, reminiscent of “rising prices, elevated regulation, and financial pressures”. It’s no secret that the hospitality business is presently in dire straits, nevertheless it’s been a very robust half-decade for these counter-cultural upstarts. In June of 2021, a major variety of former staff penned an open letter, highlighting the “cult of character”, “poisonous attitudes” and a “tradition of worry” felt by workers on the firm. In 2022, a BBC One Disclosure investigation alleged inappropriate behaviour from then CEO James Watt in direction of feminine staff, accusations that he denied. In 2024, the brewer dropped their pledge to pay all workers the true dwelling wage. Later that yr, a second open letter – this time from workforce members at BrewDog’s showpiece pub in Waterloo station – hit the information, with claims of “bullying and gaslighting” from the administration, in addition to “racism, sexism and ableism”.
These allegations don’t appear to have impacted BrewDog’s backside line an excessive amount of. The corporate’s monetary outcomes for the yr ending 31 December 2024 confirmed gross revenues of £357m, bringing them again into profitability for the primary time since 2021. However what do the closures, that are anticipated to occur with simply 4 days discover, signify for the model? The commerce union Unite described them as “not simply morally repugnant, [but] probably illegal”. BrewDog has mentioned there shall be a 14-day session for all workers liable to redundancy.
As for the buyer, stroll into BrewDog Waterloo on any given weeknight and also you’ll discover a peculiar mixture of commuters, vacationers and team-bonding journeys. There’s a slide, there’s a podcast studio, there’s an ice cream truck. It’s actually exhausting to think about the pub being anybody’s native. And it’s additionally exhausting to think about the following technology of drinkers ever being significantly bothered about stepping foot inside its cavernous partitions.
A lot has been mentioned about Gen Z’s supposed abstinence (a current examine by the beverage business’s information trackers IWSR discovered that alcohol consumption amongst 18- to 25-year-olds really rose within the UK from 66 per cent in 2023 to 76 per cent in 2025) however, anecdotally, you solely must cross the brink of a conventional London pub on a Friday or Saturday evening to see that the one factor BrewDog rallied in opposition to is now undoubtedly cool once more: the right boozer, with its packets of pork scratchings and mass-produced lager and stout. London pubs just like the Blue Posts on Berwick Avenue in Soho, the King’s Head in Finsbury Park, and the Military & Navy in Dalston are usually teeming with younger folks chasing enjoyable and authenticity (and, sure, splitting the G). Even the comparatively new buzzy Soho boozer, the Devonshire, eschews the stripped-back millennial aesthetic in favour of a basic, cosy pub really feel. It’s a part of a broader development away from the tasteless minimalism of the 2010s in direction of one thing messier and freer – and in direction of one thing that, crucially, is much less involved with anti-establishment posturing.
In 2024, Watt stepped down from his function as CEO after 17 years, “to take a little bit of break day, to journey, [and] to spend extra time with my household and buddies”. James Arrow, who changed him, additionally stop in March of this yr. However since resigning, Watt has discovered a second wind as one thing of an internet superstar, creating banal video content material along with his spouse Georgia “Toff” Toffolo (of Made in Chelsea fame), launching a Dragons Den-style TV present known as Home of Unicorns, and rubbing shoulders with Jim Davidson and Lee Anderson at Nigel Farage’s sixtieth birthday bash.
So is that this the start of the top for BrewDog? Have we reached peak Punk? The world is a really totally different place now to what it was in 2007. The try-hard PR stunts, the non-public fairness, and the controversial employment practises – all beneath the inauthentic guise of “punk” – feels, in 2025, deeply uncool. So, drink up your Misplaced Lager. It’s nearly time for final orders.
[See also: A drinker’s guide to offshore London]