The Sunday Times Magazine • 39towards all signatories since the day of the
open letter, with brief pauses for apologies
when he has been caught”. Prior to the
release of the BBC documentary, Watt
published a post on an internal forum for
investors warning that “all of this is very,
very likely to end up in court” and that the
identity of anonymous sources might be
revealed in legal proceedings. The recent
revelation that he hired private investigators
to obtain information about some of his
critics — something he acknowledges but
argues was justifiable in context — has only
amplified this impression.W
here does Watt’s ferocity
come from? A childhood
spent battling North Sea
waves might have
something to do with it.
“People think my management style is
intense, [but] if they were a week in a
fishing boat under some of the captains
I’ve sailed with [they might understand me
better],” he says. “Maybe my management
style is so intense because I’ve seen those
elements of leadership.”
Watt’s childhood was affluent — his
father, James, owned a stake in a large fishing
firm and in 2009, during divorce proceedings
with his mother, Anne, a teacher, had his
wealth estimated at £10-12 million. Watt
says his early years were marked by a sense
of never quite fitting in. He had a “severe
speech impediment” as a child, which
affected his pronunciation of Rs and Ls, and
he was “bullied and teased in the
playground” as a result. As a teenager he had
“severe acne, which kind of made you come
out on the fringes of things by default”.
Perhaps most formative was his difficult
relationship with his now estranged
mother, for whom he says nothing was ever
close to good enough. “My parents’
feedback was, ‘Well, you’re not going to be
smart enough to do that, so you should
maybe think about something else.’ ” This
gave him an “inadequacy complex” that
has spurred him on ever since. He says he
has not spoken to his mum for 20 years. She
did not want to comment on the issue.
Watt is clearly an awkward character who
makes enemies easily. He’s also quiteprobably a creative genius when it comes to
beer production, something he’s far more
comfortable talking about than his emotions.
At one point on our tour his brogue is
drowned out by the gale, but he carries on
anyway with a long soliloquy on anaerobic
digestion. When he’s in this mode I’m not
sure he even cares if anyone can actually
hear him. He’s particularly excited about
the spirits BrewDog has started making —
vodka, whisky, gin — and he believes they
can use technology to recreate the 20-year
ageing process of Scotch in a mere three
years. Does he worry about offending
people, I wonder, disrupting the venerable
Scotch industry just a short drive from
hallowed Speyside? “Do I look worried?”
There’s that arrogant bastard. But for all
Watt’s cockiness, there’s no doubt the
events of the past year have left him “badly
wounded”, as one colleague puts it to me.
As the allegations kept on coming, Watt
struggled to sleep and had knots in his
stomach. When the BBC implied he was
a predator, he felt like he couldn’t pick his
young daughters up from school. “It has
been nothing short of hell,” he says.
It’s fair to say life as a bachelor has made
things more complicated for Watt. Gossip
swirls around him wherever he goes. Has
he ever had a romantic encounter with a
BrewDog employee? Initially he gives me
a categorical “no”. When I ask him again a
few days later, however, he admits he had
a “brief, amicable relationship with a teammember about five or six years ago”. This
took place in the US during a difficult
period of his marriage. He says it was a
mistake and “should never have happened”.
And what about those who view him
less amicably? In the BBC documentary
BrewDog bar staff in Ohio describe Watt as
using the American branch of the company
as a personal playground. Meg Herman,
an Ohio-based employee from 2017-19 (who
claims she was sacked for theft after she
helped herself to a damaged six-pack of
beer), alleged that Watt took a female
employee who he’d been flirting with “up
to the roof ” of a BrewDog bar in Canal
Winchester, Ohio.
Others reported him bringing a drunk
woman to a BrewDog bar and “making out”
with her. One said he would bring “cute
little blondes” for tours of the bars. A former
bar manager, Dani Campbell, claims she was
told at her first manager’s meeting not to be
in a room alone with Watt, because she was
“his type”. Multiple bar managers said they
would issue similar warnings to their staff.
Another, Dylan Gray, says he would try to
schedule male staff to work the nights Watt
was in town. Gray also claimed Watt stared
at one female staff member so intently
that he used to accompany her whenever
Watt was at the bar. These are not Harvey
Weinstein-grade allegations, but they do
appear to reflect a lack of boundary-setting
by Watt that upset multiple staff members.
This, however, is where the story
becomes seriously contested. Watt denies
ever having been up to the roof of the bar
with any women, and he denies kissing a
drunk woman on the premises. He says he
has analysed the rota shifts at the bar where
Gray was working and says there is no
evidence of more men working the nights
he was in town; in fact, he says, more
women worked those nights.
“I completely dismiss this out of hand,”
he says. “That characterisation is utterly
false and based around false rumours about
myself. If people felt uncomfortable around
me I regret that, it was never my intention.
But I strongly dispute any insinuation that
I have done anything wrong here.”
Watt claims there were at least 23
“stone-cold factual mistakes” in the“WE HAVE MULTIPLE
ACCOUNTS OF
STAFF TERRIFIED
OF BEING IN WATT’S
PRESENCE,” SAYS THE
PUNKS WITH PURPOSE
CAMPAIGN GROUP
➤
Rob Mackay, a former marketing executive
at BrewDog, says his experience at the
company left him “mentally damaged”Charlotte Cook
helped launch Punks
With Purpose to give
former BrewDog
employees a voiceBREWDOG