BrewDog™: how hipster iconoclasts become what they hate
Elvis Watt and Elvis Dickie birthed BrewDog in April 2007. They didn’t always share a first-name — that stunt came later — but they did share a sense of boredom with the “industrial brewed lagers and stuffy ales that dominate the UK’s beer market”. Their self-professed mission: ‘to make other people as passionate about great craft beer as they are’.
Having attended the Peterhead Academy together as teens, Watt and Dickie started brewing together because “basically, we couldn’t find anything we really wanted to drink”. It was a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale from a Tesco’s in Stonehaven that set Elvis Watt down the brewing path: “just this total explosion, this bomb of flavour — this, like… awakening. And all around, industrial lagers and conservative cask ales, and nothing in between.”
Their first big break came in 2008, when they landed a contract with Tesco after sweeping 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th place in a blind taste-test run by the supermarket. “We went down to Tesco’s headquarters, and they told us they loved our beer and wanted to put us in 500 shops, buying 2,000 cases a week… We put on our best poker faces and said ‘no problem’. Yet we were just two guys filling bottles by hand.”
Having failed to meet payments on their current loan, their bank denied them the £150,000 necessary to install the machinery they’d need to meet Tesco’s order. So they turned to another lender, and lied: “we said that our bank had offered us an amazing deal, but that if you can match it we’ll switch, and they went for it. You have got to do what you have to do.”
The two Elvises are undoubtedly iconoclasts — the BrewDog Welcome Video sees them send a bowling ball smashing into 10 bottles of Stella, while declaring “we brew beer for punks: bold, irreverent, and uncompromising”. After the Portman Group — the UK alcohol industry’s self-regulating watchdog — claimed BrewDog had breached their Code of Practice for using the word ‘aggressive’ on their Punk IPA packaging, BrewDog released Speedball, a beer named after the cocaine/heroin, stimulant/depressant cocktail which killed, amongst others, Jean-Michael Basquiat and Phillip Seymour Hoffman. “They were trying to block the sale of our top three selling beers” said Elvis Dickie “so this time we thought we would give them something worth banning us for”.
2009 saw BrewDog release Tokyo* (18.2% ABV) and Tactical Nuclear Penguin (32% ABV). 2010 brought Sink The Bismark (41% ABV) and The End Of History (55% ABV) — a beer stronger than most vodka, made in an ice-cream factory by repeatedly chilling the beer and then skimming off ice from the surface. Each of the 12 road-kill covered bottles they made went on sale for between £500-£700.
In an interview with Jelisa Castrodale of MUNCHIES, Elvis Watt explained why they kept topping themselves with the strength of their beers:
“We love to challenge people’s perceptions about what beer is and how it can be served. People have been conditioned to think that beer is something that you have to drink in a pint, and it’s usually made by a big multinational company, and we want to get away from all of that.”
With the release of Tokyo* they seemed to have achieved their goal. The beer was banned by Portman when a member of the public complained that it advocated “excessive consumption”. But if their project has been plagued by controversy, much of it has been deliberately self-induced: the ban-inducing member of the public was Mr Watt himself. As one spokesperson for Portman told a BBC reporter “BrewDog’s business model has traditionally used complaints by the public as a PR opportunity for their brands.”
When you read through the company’s personal history, it’s striking how little their cornerstone beers are actually mentioned. Despite being two of their headliner beers, Punk IPA and Dead Pony Club are only mentioned once each, and in passing. Instead, the story focuses strongly on their records, their publicity stunts, and the growth of the business. For a company that’s supposed to be all about beer, they seem more taken by their headlines than by their headliners. According to John Kyme, a small brewer from Cumbria, that’s the whole point. He told the Guardian: “very few are making beers that are vastly superior to anyone else’s… It’s only in the hype that there is an absolute, quantum gap between BrewDog and the rest.”
It was in October 2016 that the co-founders — birth names James Watt and Martin Dickie — began sharing a first name. After the Elvis Presley estate threatened legal action against BrewDog’s Elvis Juice, a grapefruit infused IPA, Watt and Dickie legally changed their names by deed poll to ‘Elvis’. In a statement regarding the matter, the pair claimed to take issue “with the idea that a name could be confined to a single, late celebrity”, changing their names to “prove their commitment” to this position. It was a publicity stunt that garnered much attention, even if it did little to stave off the actual litigation.
It wasn’t long, however, before the tables were turned. In an effort to protect their Lone Wolf brand of vodka, BrewDog’s legal team threatened action against a family-run pub in Birmingham which was undergoing a name-change, rebranding itself as ‘Lone Wolf’. Accused of hypocrisy, Watt backed down on Twitter:
A day later, fresh threats of legal action from BrewDog emerged; this time against music promoter Tony Green, who had made plans to open a bar in Leeds under the name ‘Draft Punk’. Law firm Lawrie IP warned that BrewDog had a “well-established beer under the name of punk” and that they were concerned that the bar would “take unfair advantage of, or be detrimental to” BrewDog’s Punk trademark. Tony Green told the Guardian: “They can’t own punk, that’s the whole point… It’s inherited, it’s British culture.”
This time BrewDog didn’t back down. They released a statement on their website: “we are just looking after our business and our team. We own trademarks just like we own our buildings, our brewing equipment, and our dogs. If someone stole our dog or our bottling machine we would not be happy, intellectual property is no different.”
To be fair, BrewDog’s passion for independent craft beer is high-grade — of the 9 people that have passed Cicerone’s top beer-tasting exam, 2 work for BrewDog — and it extends beyond their own brand — BrewDog bars stock their favourite independent craft beers from all over the world. When Camden Town was bought out by AB InBev, the world’s largest drinks company, it was promptly and publicly pulled from all of BrewDog’s bars, with Watt declaring “we will not sell beers made by AB InBev. And BrewDog will never sell out to some monolithic drinks giant. Not ever. Mega corporations care about costs, market share, dividends, valuations. They don’t care about beer.”
But the thing is, if you’re going to make the whole world care about beer, pretty soon you’re going to find you need to care about a whole lot of other things too — like marketing. The problem with rebelling against the past is that, often, the past had its reasons.
BrewDog, of course, is well on the way to becoming a mega, multi-national corporation — they’re now Europe’s largest craft brewer. The American craft beer market is famously hyper-local, with more than 5000 local breweries and tens of thousands of different beers across the nation — to which BrewDog’s website declares: “now in the biggest project over the ten-year history of BrewDog, we have arrived to play our own small part in it.”
That ‘small part’ is a reference to their new state-of the art brewery in Columbus, Ohio; a brewery which cost over $35 million, funded partly through a massive investment programme. Elsewhere, their language matches this scale. “The key thing for us at the moment is to build strong local roots,” says Watt. “That means build a massive presence in Columbus and a base from there in Ohio to grow from.” In a video about the project, Dickie adds “everything about BrewDog USA is built for rapid growth.”
To achieve their own goals, BrewDog will need to care about more than just the beer. BrewDog is becoming one of the multi-national industrial breweries they once couldn’t see the point of, and along the way they’re learning the value of trademarks, dividends and economies of scale. As Watt told the London Stock Exchange Group: “finances are the lifeblood of any business. If you get it wrong, the team just become busy fools”.
“In the matter of reforming things,” said GK Chesterton “there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox.” That paradox was later summarised by JFK: “don’t ever take a fence down until you know the reason why it was put up.” Chesterton explains himself:
“Some person had some reason for thinking [that fence] would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable. It is extremely probable that we have overlooked some whole aspect of the question, if something set up by human beings like ourselves seems to be entirely meaningless and mysterious. There are reformers who get over this difficulty by assuming that all their fathers were fools; but if that be so, we can only say that folly appears to be a hereditary disease.”
Chesterton could very easily have been thinking about BrewDog, but was in fact writing from personal experience. In the opening chapter of Orthodoxy, an account of Chesterton’s religious journey, he states:
“I have often had a fancy for writing a romance about an English yachtsman who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England under the impression that it was a new island in the South Seas… There will probably be a general impression that the man who landed (armed to the teeth and talking by signs) to plant the British flag on that barbaric temple which turned out to be the Pavilion at Brighton, felt rather a fool…”
“I am the man who with the utmost daring discovered what had been discovered before… this book explains how I fancied I was the first to set foot in Brighton and then found I was the last. It recounts my elephantine adventures in pursuit of the obvious… I did try to found a heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy.”
Whether it’s beer or religion, there have been many failed attempts at heresy down through the ages: people who pulled up fence-posts, only to re-erect them decades later. BrewDog aren’t the first to rediscover what’s already been discovered before ─ and they certainly won’t be the last.
