Every so often, Brewdog goes viral on British social media. An ill-judged spat with a much-loved Scottish lager brand; anger over the revelation that it was going to stop paying Britain’s real living wage; a skit that appears to make fun of the middle-aged, baseball-capped owners; an arch review of the brewery’s flagship London bar, which describes it as an “infernal pint crèche for confused children and the wife-dodging salarymen they’ll one day become.”
As one Twitter user put it recently, “When you see Brewdog trending it’s never because they’ve made a lovely new beer, is it?”
For Brewdog, ruffling feathers has long been a key part of the business model. From its early tussles with cask-ale consumer group CAMRA to taking on Vladimir Putin, Brewdog and its CEO James Watt have thrived on confrontation and controversy. “If we didn’t find a way to do things unconventionally, we wouldn’t have got our message out there, we would have got lost,” as Watt himself put it last year.
This appears to have served Brewdog well. Founded in 2007, it runs 72 bars in the U.K.; global revenue grew 13 percent to £321 million ($406 million) last year, although there was a significant operating loss of £24 million ($30 million). It has raised more than £80 million ($101 million) of crowdfunded cash from around 200,000 small investors, creating an army of so-called “Equity Punks” in the process.
But as the social media response suggests, many Britons have had enough of Brewdog’s schtick.
