How BrewDog turned poisonous and misplaced £148m: It made the ‘worst boss on the planet’ a millionaire… earlier than all of it went fallacious

It started out with two friends selling homebrewed beer out of a van with an anarchic, Sex Pistols-esque, never say die ‘punk’ ethos.

Nearly 20 years on, BrewDog has charted a very different course: it’s now a $2billion corporate behemoth with a long trail of controversy, failed enterprises, allegations of toxic culture and a seeming dismissal of its DIY origins in its wake.

Self-espousing punk founders James Watt and Martin Dickie once blew up cans of Heineken as a middle finger to the big bad world of faceless corporations.

Watt would later be the short-term owner of more than half a million pounds’ worth of shares in the Dutch brewery amid talks of a buyout – one of several allegations that damaged the company’s ‘authentic’ reputation among hip beer drinkers.

Despite parachuting in new CEO James Taylor and unveiling a sleek new rebrand, the damage has been done: 2,000 bars have dropped flagship beer Punk IPA in a year.

BrewDog has posted cumulative losses of £148million for the last five years and is now up for sale. Watt, who ironically calls himself the ‘world’s worst boss’, is said to be mulling a buyout.

Investors on its ‘Equity for Punks’ forum, who shelled out to be part of the BrewDog dream, are incandescent.

‘Brewdog has stopped doing what it was built to do, and shifted its strategy to be the same as all of the other big breweries,’ wrote one.

‘Gone are the totally unique, revolutionary, small batch beers that you can’t get anywhere else in the world, and instead all we’re getting is cans and cans of generic mass-produced rubbish.’

It caps off a saga that began as a Scottish success story ahead of the curve: when fisherman Watt and brewer Dickie founded the firm in 2007 ‘craft beer’ was a relatively new term, not the familiar catch-all for garishly-labelled cans of seven per cent ale all too common in today’s trendy pubs.

The pair took a risk (a £20,000 bank loan) when they began brewing in Fraserburgh, Aberdeenshire that quickly paid off. They brewed Punk IPA: brash, hoppy beer that tasted like a punch in the face and proved to be an instant hit.

Another £150,000 bank loan later – earned on the back of a lie that a competing bank was offering a similar deal – saw Punk IPA on the shelves at Tesco.

Ever eager to keep eyes on them, the duo soon produced Tokyo*: an 18.2 per cent bottled stout that was, at the time, the UK’s strongest beer. 

It was seemingly designed to do nothing other than inflame the press and wider industry, which it promptly did with a label reading ‘Everything in moderation, including moderation itself’ – leading to accusations of encouraging binge drinking.

It soon earned the ire of the UK’s voluntary alcohol regulator, the Portman Group, which banned the beer from being sold in shops and bars. BrewDog responded by releasing its weakest beer yet: a 1.1 per cent ale called, inevitably, Nanny State.

It was the first of many PR stunts that came to define the brewery at its peak. Beers of 32 per cent and 55 per cent strength followed, the latter packed into taxidermied bodies of rodents.

By 2012, BrewDog had a new permanent home in Ellon, Aberdeenshire, 140 employees, 10 bars and 6,500 shareholders in its Equity for Punks (EFP) scheme.

This allowed fans to buy ordinary shares in the company in exchange for discounts, invites to AGMs (or ‘annual general mayhem’, as the company so foppishly put it) and the potential for a big financial payout in the event the company was sold off.

And when it emerged that drinks giant Diageo had intervened to stop BrewDog winning an industry award, Dickie and Watt felt nothing short of vindicated that they were the plucky underdogs scaring the big breweries senseless.

The House of Guinness (and Smirnoff, and Johnnie Walker, among others),  Watt said in an online blog, was ‘a band of dishonest hammerheads and dumb a** corporate freaks. No soul and no morals, with the integrity of a rabid dog’.

‘The craft beer revolution of America looks set to hit the UK, and it seems the incumbent players are going to use any means possible, including immoral and dishonest methods to stifle competition and desperately cling to market share,’ he added.

BrewDog was in charge and, for a time, unstoppable. Over the coming years it would open bars and breweries in Germany, Australia and the US; they starred in a US documentary series; the Equity for Punks scheme would eventually raise a total of £75million for the company.

In 2015, Watt and Dickie parachuted toy cats wearing top hats across London to herald the fourth round of its Equity for Punks – another vulgar gesture to the business world that it sought to reject.

‘This is a new dawn for beer, and a new dawn for small business finance,’ Dickie said in a video accompanying the stunt.

But was it? Two years later, BrewDog sold a 23 per cent stake in the company to US private equity firm TSG for £213million.

It reportedly earned Watt and Dickie £100million, and gave the private investor preference when it came to any eventual sale of the business – above the ‘ordinary’ Equity Punks who shelled out, on average, £400.

TSG, as of 2026, has a $13billion investment portfolio. It described its mission at the time as looking to ‘partner with visionary founders building next-generation consumer brands’. None of this, it has to be said, was very punk rock.

Watt tried to defend the deal, telling the Morning Advertiser: ‘If it was a sell-out, I would be on a beach somewhere and not working my a*** off for the next 10 years.’

As it happens, Watt would stand down as BrewDog’s CEO seven years later – under a dark cloud of allegations that dealt huge damage to the company’s reputation.

Before that would come more PR hijinks with Watt and Dickie: being projected naked onto Parliament a la Gail Porter; changing their names to Elvis by deed poll in a legal battle with Elvis Presley’s estate over its Elvis Juice beer; posing as cross-dressing sex workers under the slogan #dontmakeusdothis to promote Equity for Punks.

And there were the ‘funny’ beers: Hello My Name is Vladimir, a beer ‘not for gays’, was sent to the Kremlin in protest at the 2014 Sochi Winter games; ‘Pink IPA’ was a relabelled Punk IPA that espoused to be a call to arms for the gender pay gap that fell flat as a patronising gaffe.

They did little to slow the company’s astronomical growth and expansion: in 2018 came the first BrewDog hotel in Ohio, with optional beer on tap in each room. Then came the corporate tie-ups: British Airways and ALDI got their own branded beers.

BrewDog then moved into cider and later into spirits, opening a distillery in Ellon producing gin, vodka and rum, some of which later went into canned cocktails.

Some worried the spirits weren’t the only things being distilled as the company expanded. As of the end of 2025,  BrewDog has even launched alcohol-free beers with added minerals targeted at health-conscious Gen Zers.

But the early 2020s brought multiple PR wins: 500,000 bottles of hand sanitiser made for the NHS during Covid (alongside Barnard Castle Eye Test, a ‘hazy’ IPA parodying Dominic Cummings’ infamous Downing Street rose garden presser); a B Corporation certification for its dedication to social and environmental responsibility.

BrewDog also bought itself the 10,000 acre Kinrara Estate near Aviemore and pledged it would plant millions of trees on 50 sq km of land in a bid to become the world’s first ‘carbon negative’ brewery.

The tree-planting would be funded directly by sales of Lost Lager, the firm said. Then there was ‘pawternity leave’, giving staff time off with new pets. For BrewDog, it was win after win after win. Until it wasn’t.

In June 2021, a group of 300 former BrewDog employees calling themselves Punks With Purpose published an open letter, alleging that the company’s DIY ethos was a front, and that behind it sat a work environment built on fear and toxicity.

They claimed staff were overworked, told to ignore health and safety guidelines and assaulted or harassed by senior staff – and that many PR stunts, including the Elvis name changes, sending beer to Putin and pawternity leave, were essentially myths.

‘BrewDog was, and is, built on a cult of personality,’ the group said, claiming the responsibility for the company’s ‘rotten culture’ rested with Watt.

Six months later, the BBC broadcast a devastating documentary in which several former workers from across the world made serious allegations about Mr Watt’s behaviour.

Among the allegations were that he kissed a drunk customer, that female staff were given advice on how to avoid unwelcome attention from him, and that some were even scheduled to be off when he was expected to visit their venues.

One bar worker in Ohio, Katelynn Ising, said she recalled telling new female members of staff: ‘Hey, just so you know, James Watt’s coming to town. Don’t always do your hair and makeup that day, like don’t catch his attention.’

He was even accused of taking female patrons on private tours of BrewDog facilities, some of whom, it was claimed, were intoxicated. Staff at an Ohio bar claimed to have seen him kissing a drunk customer.

Watt denied any allegations of being inappropriate, but later said he would sometimes go on ‘dates’ in America and apologised for making anyone ‘uncomfortable’.

‘I hugely regret anyone feeling in any way uncomfortable around me, as the programme set out,’ he later wrote on the Equity for Punks forum. 

However, he hit out at what he called ‘false rumours and misinformation’, and complained to broadcast regulator Ofcom about the BBC’s film. Ofcom upheld none of his claims.

The documentary also revealed Watt had purchased some £500,000 of shares in Heineken and invested £2million in a hedge fund in the Cayman Islands, flying in the face of the punk ethos on which his company had been built.

By 2023, there was a cloud over BrewDog, even as it unveiled plans to triple the size of its bars and hotel estate to 300 venues by 2030. 

The foundations made shaky by the open letter were weakened further by the BBC’s revelations – and by 2024 Watt had stood down as CEO, staying on as the ambiguously titled Captain. 

By then, he was dating Made In Chelsea star Georgia ‘Toff’ Toffolo. They married in March 2025 after giving guests just 48 hours notice. By then, there was little of the ‘punk’ left to Watt – or his firm.

BrewDog, which once vowed to challenge the big brewers, partnered with Budweiser for an expansion into China in 2023. It opened a new Waterloo bar with co-working spaces, a bowling alley and a helter skelter, where pints can cost upwards of £8. 

After almost 20 years, Martin Dickie left in 2025, citing personal reasons. He remains a shareholder and a person of significant control in the firm.

Many of its environmental and social kudos have gone too: the B Corporation certification was stripped in December 2022 after the BBC documentary and the open letter; BrewDog said it voluntarily gave up the accolade.

The firm no longer pays the ‘real’ Living Wage set by the Resolution Foundation either, after it posted a series of annual losses.

The distillery has been shut down – weeks after the company announced a three-year vodka and gin partnership with top-flight football side Aberdeen FC. 

And it sold the Lost Forest after half of the trees it planted died or failed to take root, after admitting that Lost Lager sales weren’t actually directly linked to tree planting (though the estate’s new owners say they were ‘blown away’ by the work it had done).

And as of last week, the company’s future is up in the air after financial experts were called in to look at whether it should be broken up. Staff were told by email; some found out in the first instance via media reports.

If the company is broken up, the 220,000 Equity for Punks investors who sank £75million into the company will likely be at the bottom of the pile for any payout. They are almost certainly guaranteed to get nothing.

The sale of 23 per cent of the company to TSG saw the private equity firm handed ‘preferential shares’, giving it the best treatment in the event BrewDog is sold. 

One thread on the Equity for Punks investor forum, seen by the Daily Mail, is simply titled: ‘I think we all knew this was coming.’

‘More evidence that the EFPs (Equity for Punk investors), who shelled out cash to get them in this position, mean less than f*** all to the company,’ said one.

As BrewDog continues to sail through troubled waters, Watt has gone it alone. Last year, he promised to launch an Elon Musk-style, DOGE-esque audit of wasteful public spending, of which there has since been no word.

More recently, he has been exploring biohacking, the latest playground of the rich, in a bid to live longer and better. He recently shared a video of himself on Instagram as he underwent ApheriX – a blood filtering treatment that costs £4,000 at a time.

And there is his new venture, Social Tip, which gives people influencer-esque payouts if they share posts about brands of supermarket and coffee shop. 

Last year, he shared a post bragging that it had paid out £250,000 to its 65,000 users to date (£3.85 each, much less than Toffolo will get for endorsing a brand to her two million Instagram followers). He filmed it from the back of a plush car alongside Toff.

Beneath the post, one user had written: ‘Imagine how many Equity Punks could get their investment paid back to them, (should they want it), with that money?’

As it stands, the hundreds of thousands of fans who put their faith in a ‘new dawn for beer’ are likely watching the sun set on their investments. 

All the while, BrewDog’s original ‘punk’ sets sail for new horizons among high society.