34 • The Sunday Times Magazine
ames Watt climbs the flimsy metal staircase
that wraps around one of BrewDog’s 100ft
distillery towers without fear or hesitation.
We’re in Ellon, Aberdeenshire, and a
vicious wind is whipping in from the North
Sea, strong enough to whisk a granny off
her feet. Watt looks back as I follow him
tentatively: “You’re not afraid of heights,
are you?” I mumble a noncommittal
response. “Just don’t look down,” he grins.
At the summit is a decapitated owl. It’s
a model, there to scare birds away from the
distillery towers, and has been beheaded
by the gale. This all feels a little on the nose
as a metaphor for the BrewDog journey:
a daring climb to the top, going from garage
ale to the world’s leading independent beer
brand in little more than a decade. But also
a meteoric rise untempered by sufficient
wisdom or caution, in which lives and
careers have been trampled in a breakneck
bid for global domination. In fact Headless
Owl would make a rather apt name for
BrewDog’s next pale ale.
Watt, 39, is the co-founder, chief executive
and animating spirit of the Scottish craft
beer powerhouse, which is valued in the
region of £2 billion. He also might well be
its Achilles’ heel. To call the past year Watt’s
annus horribilis feels like underplaying
things: it has been a rolling calamity in
which the brand has been pummelled and
his position as CEO called into question.
BrewDog surfed the crest of the craft
beer revolution, but as the wave crashed last
year the company found itself at the centre
of a #MeToo-style uprising, with former
employees launching a barrage of
allegations about toxic workplace culture,
misogyny, sexual misconduct, false
marketing, greenwashing (which Watt
denies) ... you name it. This has been a clash
between outraged millennial employees
demanding modern standards of corporate
care and a hard-charging CEO seeking
global domination at all costs. The result
is an unholy mess.
For many years BrewDog was the bad-boy
superstar of British brewing that just
couldn’t stop growing. It opened its first bar
in Aberdeen in 2010, and its 111th in Berlin
last month. Several more are under
construction, including on the Las Vegas
Strip and a 26,500 sq ft bar complex with
bowling alley in London, near Waterloo
station, due to open later this year.
Its products are everywhere: in pubs,
bars and supermarket aisles. It ships its
most popular beers, including Punk IPA,
Hazy Jane and Elvis Juice, to 55 countries,
has large breweries in Germany and the US,
and has made considerable strides into the
vast American market, where it was thefastest-growing beer business in 2020. It
has also pioneered crowdfunding equity,
raising a record £85 million from more
than 200,000 small investors, whom it calls
“equity punks”. This isn’t just a beer
company, it’s a movement: some 15,000
people attended BrewDog’s Aberdeen AGM
in 2019, which more closely resembled
a rock festival than a corporate gathering.
As BrewDog grew, Watt and his
co-founder, school friend Martin Dickie,
became known for their ostentatious
marketing stunts, such as driving a tank
around London in 2011 and 2013, or
dropping taxidermied “fat cats” over the
City from a helicopter to celebrate a
crowdfunding milestone in 2015. For some
observers they embodied a kind of beer bro
toxicity that was just waiting to be called
out: this is a company that people love to
hate, and Watt in particular can be a
Marmitish figure — many find him abrasive
and unsympathetic. It’s no surprise to learn
the beer that most inspired him was a
Californian ale called Arrogant Bastard.
Things began going wrong for Watt in
May 2021, when former employees started“I FULLY ACCEPT
THAT I’VE BEEN
TOO INTENSE, TOO
DEMANDING AS
A MANAGER. AT
TIMES I MISS
SOCIAL CUES”
BrewDog’s co-founders, James Watt (in the tank, standing) and Martin Dickie (in the black
cap), on manoeuvres at the Bank of England to publicise a 2013 crowdfunding campaignWatt and Dickie
prepare to drop
taxidermy “fat cats”
over the City of
London in 2015