On Monday, Tilray Brands snapped up the BrewDog brand and selected assets for £33m ($44m), far below a heady valuation which reached into billions back in better times.
The Scottish craft brewer has always been in the media spotlight – for good reasons or bad – with its unique take on what craft beer should be.
So what happened? Is BrewDog’s sale a sign of troubled times for beer – or was it a victim of its own success?
The maverick years
BrewDog was founded in 2007 by two 24-year-olds: James Watt and Martin Dickie. With some ‘very scary bank loans’, they started making their own craft beers in Scotland, initially selling at local markets out of a beaten-up old van.
But the company scaled-up quickly and soon became Scotland’s largest independent brewery.
BrewDog was initially defined by its edgy, maverick marketing: which never, ever shied away from controversy (and mostly sought it out).
It started with the beer names: such as Dead Pony Club in 2012. There was ‘The End of History’: a beer packaged in dead animals. There was the push towards making a beer as alcoholic as it could possibly be: with ‘Tactical Nuclear Penguin’ at 32% and ‘Sink the Bismarck’ at 41%.
Back then, BrewDog stood up unapologetically to corporate rules, big beer, political correctness, and red tape and regulations. Sure, it was often accused of going too far. But it was tone that resonated with people all over the UK – whether craft beer fans or not.
BrewDog was predictably unpredictable.
When the estate of Elvis Presley challenged the name of BrewDog’s Elvis Juice, Watt and Dickie shrugged it off: informing the world that they’d changed their first names to ‘Elvis’ via deed poll (Elvis Juice lives on to this day).
And when BrewDog saw a brew in ALDI that looked remarkably similar to its own Punk IPA, its method of retaliation was not litigation but tongue-in-cheek innovation. Its comeback was an IPA in Aldi colours: a brew Aldi ended up stocking in its stores.
Repeatedly (and inevitably) coming up in front of the UK’s advertising watchdog, the ASA, many times: BrewDog invariably told the regulator to f*** off (without obscuring the expletive).
But these years are what made BrewDog what it was: a craft beer with its own irreverent attitude, unhindered by norms and expectations.
The global heyday
BrewDog could have sat back and revelled in its cult status as a fringe brand: enjoying life as an irreverent, non-conformist teenager without a care in the world and a never-ending supply of beer (and that could have worked perfectly well).
But it decided to grow up. And that was a wise choice, because the potential of craft was enormous. BrewDog moved away from its polarizing marketing stunts and started to make smart business decisions. It looked at the global potential of the brand and the opportunity for expansion: notably with the US in 2015.
And it was a brand with the power and willingness to innovate.
Its Equity for Punks scheme, launched back in 2009, was a game-changer: as an early crowdfunding model, craft beer aficionados loved the chance to own a small part of a brand they loved and were delighted to see the value of their investments shoot up. Around 220,000 investors contributed £75m across seven rounds, helping propel BrewDog to new heights (part of the deal was a paid-for trip to the brewery’s AGM – Annual General Mayhem – party every year).
The brand wanted to push the envelope of innovation in everything: whether craft beer, tech or even food.
It piloted socially-distanced drone beer deliveries during the pandemic. It opened its first alcohol-free bar in 2020 while the alcohol-free beer category was still finding its feet.
It launched a ‘craft beer airline’; and experimented with hybrid burgers. It didn’t matter if these initiates succeeded or failed: it was about innovation, marketing and bringing excitement and new ideas to the category.
The cracks start to appear
In 2021, former employees alleged that BrewDog fostered a ‘culture of fear’. James Watt issued a public apology: but the incident cast a huge shadow over the values of openness and authenticity the brewer had once built its brand up on.
Then there were its environmental claims. BrewDog had, again, shot for the moon with ambitious projects: but failed to pull them off.
A 10,000 acre forest in Scotland was purchased for £8.8m in 2020 to sequester carbon: but 50% of the trees died and BrewDog sold off the site five years later. Having originally trumpeted its carbon negative goals, BrewDog realized the cost of the project was out-of-control.
Then there was the simple matter of sales: losses for five consecutive years with no sign of a turnaround in sight. James Watt stepped down as CEO in May 2024; Martin Dickie in August 2025.
Falling sales
Why did sales fall? BrewDog has pointed to the macroeconomic challenges for the beer and hospitality category: citing the ‘challenging economic climate’.
It’s an environment where people are tightening their belts and have less disposable income (a problem highlighted by Diageo CEO Dave Lewis last week).
Beer, as a category, is also feeling the pinch from other categories such as trendy canned cocktails: while suffering as people drink less overall.
But hospitality is particularly a tricky area. Just a few weeks ago, UK bar chain Revolution fell into administration: shutting 21 venues with the loss of 591 jobs. This company also cited insurmountable external challenges.
And Irwin Simon, CEO of new owner Tilray Brands, says that ploughing resources into hospitality was a mistake.
“Where BrewDog got off track, in my opinion and the team’s opinion, is this: BrewDog, at one time, had close to 60 brewpubs with a lot of capital invested in that.
“And I don’t think brew pubs were the right way to go in some of the markets they did.”
Tilray Brands has now acquired 11 key BrewDog brewpubs in major cities such as London, Dublin and Edinburgh: but has turned away from the rest in the UK (38 bars will close with the loss of 484 jobs).
Another complication for BrewDog was balancing ethos and growth.
That’s a challenge for any craft brewer: which has to balance a passion for beer, innovation and experimentation with the structures of becoming a larger company.
But that challenge was particularly acute for the Scottish start-up. Its USP, for many years, was an anti-establishment stance and rebellious attitude. That’s not an easy thing to scale up.
“As an expression of brand conviction, BrewDog was extraordinary,” said Chris Lumsden, co-founder of Scottish design agency, Good Brand Consultants.
“They understood something most drinks brands never quite grasp: if you’re going to disrupt, you don’t tweak the category. You embarrass it. You force people to pick a side. They chose ‘rebellion’ and they rode it hard.”
But BrewDog became a victim of its own success.
“When growth accelerated, and the business needed process and structure, the anti-corporate stance felt less believable,” said Lumsden.
A case in point: BrewDog’s Equity in Punks scheme. These investors, who backed the company with pride in its earliest days (see below for the launch of Equity in Punks IV in 2016), are now left with nothing in the Tilray deal.
BrewDog breaks up
On February 16 this year, BrewDog said it had exhausted all cost-saving measures and efforts (for example, closing 10 bars in 2024 and setting out to redefine the bar division’s focus), and had instead put the business up for sale.
At this point, big European brewers such as Heineken, AB InBev or Carlsberg could have been expected to show interest in snatching up a global craft beer brand at a bargain price (Heineken, in 2022, and Royal Unibrew, in 2026, had been linked as a possible buyers).
James Watt was reportedly planning a rescue bid: but this also failed to materialize.
And administrators AlixPartners never received an offer that would have preserved BrewDog as it was.
Enter Tilray Brands: better known as a cannabis company (although now a wider CPG company) which has quietly built itself up through several acquisitions to become the US’ fourth largest craft brewer.
On Monday, it announced it had bought the BrewDog brand (and related intellectual property); UK brewing operations and 11 brewpubs in the UK and Ireland for a £33m ($44m) bargain.
But it’s not over…
The sale to Tilray marks the end of an era. But BrewDog is still a powerful force: it’s the leading independent brewery in the UK. It has a strong retail presence: with five of the top eight UK craft beer brands and a 4% market share of the UK grocery market by value.
And the brand BrewDog remains a force to be reckoned with. It’s a brand that, as Simon puts it, is “one of the most recognizable international craft beer brands in the world”.
Plenty of people will be unhappy that the Scottish company has sold out to Americans. But with its foundations in pioneering cannabis and cannabis beverages in North America, Tilray can at least claim an entrepreneurial spirit; an unconventional approach and willingness to think outside the box.
“BrewDog now has a long-term capital global infrastructure, operation scale behind us, creating a strong foundation for the future called Tilray Brands. This brand was built through creativity, passion and willingness to challenge convention,” said Tilray CEO Irwin Simon.
“That entrepreneurial spirit is exactly what made BrewDog a great brand and is something we respect and intend to preserve. We are not here to corporize BrewDog. Beer is not going away and we’re fully committed to making beer fun again like we’ve done with a lot of our other brands.”
Tilray only signed its UK deal on Monday: and it is still negotiating over assets in the US and Australia. Its plans for BrewDog will be eagerly anticipated.
BrewDog will never be the same again: but the story is far from over.