The Sunday Times Magazine • 35publishing allegations of sexism and toxic
workplace culture on Instagram. Most
were anonymous, with one claiming her
largely female team had been broken up
and told that “too many women in a work
environment is unhealthy”. Another said:
“The panic that surges through people
when he [Watt] is in town is TOXIC.”
In June a group of former employees
calling themselves Punks With Purpose
published an open letter that lamented the
company’s pursuit of “growth, at all costs”.
The letter, which Punks With Purpose says
has now been signed by more than 300
former and current BrewDoggers,
complained that employees were not always
treated with basic human decency, claiming
a “rotten” culture of fear pervaded BrewDog,
primarily due to Watt’s leadership.
The allegations about Watt kept coming:
homophobic jokes (for which he later
apologised), summary firings, people
afraid to look him in the eye for fear of
incurring his wrath. Things came to a head
in January when the BBC aired Disclosure:
The Truth About BrewDog, an hour-long
documentary that took a deep dive into the
accusations. Worst among them was the
suggestion that Watt behaved as a sexual
predator, with American former employees
going on the record to say he regularly
made female staff feel uncomfortable by
staring, being flirtatious and engaging in
sexually inappropriate behaviour on
BrewDog premises.
A flurry of newspaper stories followed,
including one in The Guardian last month
that reported that Watt had hired private
investigators to dig up information about
some of his critics. It all looks disastrous,
possibly even terminal for Watt’s dearest
wish: to break BrewDog into the world’s
top five brewing giants. Between the
pandemic and this reputational forest fire,
the company’s much-hyped initial public
offering has been pushed back and BrewDog
is focusing on US expansion in the near term.
I was surprised, then, when Watt agreed
to give his first tell-all interview, inviting
me to spend the day with him at the
company’s brewery near Aberdeen. Why
did he want to speak after such exposure?
The answer is that he has a different storyto tell. He admits that he has been a harsh
boss and made some of his employees
unhappy, but he firmly denies many other
claims, including those of sexual
impropriety in his American bars.
He claims he has been attacked, stalked,
besmirched and blackmailed by a tiny group
of former employees and acquaintances
with a personal vendetta against him. He
says there are criminal and civil proceedings
under way against one alleged antagonist.
He insists the BBC documentary was riven
with wild inaccuracies and flimsy
assertions. After a 12-month pummelling in
the court of public opinion, the former
fishing boat captain is ready to fight back.
He knows his company — his life’s work
— is on the line. And he thinks it’s time the
world heard his side of the story.A
rriving at the BrewDog
complex in Ellon, I’m
immediately hit by an
effusion of fermentation
notes and corporate slogans.
“Live Craft, Die Punk”, “Make Earth Great
Again”, “F*** You CO 2 ”: BrewDog has
almost as many slogans as it does beer
varieties in its onsite museum, many of them
loudly proclaiming its green credentials.
The Ellon brewery opened in 2013 and
now comprises a sprawling campus of mash
tuns, biogas plants, bars, restaurants and
offices. Watt’s corner office is a homage
to modish management techniques. Books
by Ray Dalio (Principles), Gordon Brown
(Seven Ways to Change the World) and Ben
Horowitz (The Hard Thing About Hard
Things — a particular favourite of his) are
scattered around casually.
He is more softly spoken than I expected.
I was anticipating an obnoxious beer
hipster who cloaks himself in a veneer of
environmentalism, management jargon and
floral tasting notes. This is certainly one way
to view Watt — he has the flat cap, after all.
But really he’s a deeper and darker figure, an
obsessive who clearly struggles to express
empathy or read social cues. He’s cold-eyed,
unsettling company and as determined a
person as I recall meeting, but perhaps not
entirely the monster of public imagination.
“Outside my two amazing daughters, thisbusiness is by far the most important thing
in my life,” he says. Watt’s daughters are still
at school and he is divorced from their
mother, the Scottish illustrator Johanna
Basford. “The amount I work is probably
unhealthy,” he adds. “If I don’t have the kids,
I work every weekend, every evening. I’m
completely dedicated and focused.” Being
reasonable, goes one of his favourite slogans,
is the “most common path to mediocrity”.
Watt grew up in two small Aberdeenshire
fishing communities, Gardenstown and
Peterhead. His grandfather fished, his
father, his uncles: everyone fished. An only
child, he was out on the boats by the age of
six. He swam competitively until he was 16,
when he was caught getting hammered on
vodka at a training camp. His marks were
good at school and he went on to study law
and economics at Edinburgh University,
but his relationships with the teachers were
a problem, giving him an early sense that he
might have to work for himself later in life.
“I’ve always had big issues with authority,”
he says. “I think I’d have been a very bad
employee. So I always felt that ... by
necessity I would have to be my own boss.”
Watt wasn’t much of a beer drinker
growing up. He recalls his bafflement over
how excited his friends became over bland
bottles of Budweiser snaffled from the local
offy. In 2006 Dickie, who had studied
brewing, gave his old friend a Sierra Nevada
pale ale to wash down his fish and chips. An
obsession was born. The two mates began
home brewing in a shed with a budget of
£50,000, much of it borrowed from the
Bank of Scotland. Their cold water tank was
a plastic container bought from a garden
centre and they brewed for 20-hour days
with only punk music and Bracken, Watt’s
father’s chocolate labrador, for company.
Bracken was the brew dog, and the now
famous Punk IPA was their first product.
Back in 2006, northeast Scotland wasn’t
quite ready for the craft beer revolution.
Local pubs ignored them. “It was so
demoralising,” Watt recalls. “Nobody
wanted to know.” The pair became
technically insolvent, moving back in with
their parents and Watt kept the show on the
road by working as a fisherman in his spare
time. Things finally shifted in 2008,Left: sending up
anti-gay laws in
Russia during the
Sochi Winter
Olympics, 2014Right: Watt’s father’s
chocolate labrador,
Bracken, the original
“brew dog” from
their early years➤
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