For 16 years, Brewdog has been making decent, expensive beer for people who can’t quite bring themselves to drink Kronenbourg like everyone else. Yet in that time, just through the course of selling drinks, the company has somehow managed to get itself variously accused of abusing staff, threatening small businesses, misogyny, homophobia, and animal cruelty.
This week brought a shocking new claim that an Asian staff member was sacked after her “aggressive” reaction to a far-right English Defence League meeting being held in one of Brewdog’s pubs. Why does this keep happening? And what can the company’s rich history of PR disasters tell us about the controversies that may lie ahead?
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Let’s gaze into Brewdog’s future by examining its storied past.
Allyship
The Past: To mark the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Brewdog started selling an 8.2 percent IPA called ‘MY NAME IS VLADIMIR’ featuring Andy Warhol-esque images of President Putin, as a clear statement on Russia’s homophobic legal system. This beer was marketed with the tagline “not for gays,” in an act of allyship so well-worded, only the most tedious scold could describe it as wrongheaded, unnecessary, or strange.
The Future…? Unfortunately, the brand’s critics won’t warm to sweetened golden ale UK FARAGE, nor its slightly more convoluted tagline “not for them (you know which ones we mean).” Its subsequent high sales among hardened racists will be dismissed as an unintended aberration but the reputational damage will, sadly, have already been done.
Responsibility
The Past: Harking back to the headier, hoppier days of 2009, the “enfants terrible of beers that cost £1 per sip” had two of their drinks removed from sale in the UK; their 18 percent lager TOKYO, on the grounds it promoted irresponsible drinking; and their bottled beer SPEEDBALL, on the grounds it promoted taking heroin and cocaine. “Speedball is not a cool beer, it is a dead beer,” wrote the iconoclastic hop merchants at the time of the latter’s demise. “You may think it is cool but this is merely a beautiful lie fabricated by clowns and gypsies.” I know this sounds like a joke but it isn’t.
The Future…? Brewdog launches KILLS YOU DEAD LIKE DRUGS WHICH ARE BAD, a 90 percent pilsener which, they argue, cannot possibly mislead customers as to its effects. The heads of the company’s outrage-marketing department rejoice over the subsequent furore, even as it leads to the drink being withdrawn from all markets and several deaths, but find it harder to weather the storm caused by their subsequent press release, which ill-advisedly delineates exactly what they meant by “gypsies” first time round.
Animal Rights
The Past: In a 2010 campaign, Brewdog’s 55% END OF HISTORY ale (RRP: £700 per bottle) came packaged in the dead bodies of stoats, squirrels, and hares. At the time, they were taken to task by animal rights activists for glorifying the killing of animals.
The Future…? Attempting to learn from this mistake, their new MAN’S BEST FRIEND cider comes packaged inside live XL bullies. Like the END OF HISTORY before it, each bottle costs several hundred pounds, but the price is now offset by the money that purchasers can claim back from the government for destroying said dogs as per Conservative policy.
What’s in a name?
The Past: The Brewdog brand has long had one particular ace up its sleeve: the provocative naming conventions that have made their drinks the unassailable favorite of guys who do Tough Mudder after giving up drugs because something went badly wrong on a stag do. Where were you when you first saw the words NANNY STATE on a bottle of beer? Every drinker in Britain remembers; it was like hearing “Pretty Vacant” for the first time.
The Future…? Unfortunately, consumers don’t warm to childish upside-down smut lager 5318008, and their needlessly hostile pale ale option—ATTENBOROUGH MUST DIE—badly misjudges the public mood.
Mental health
The Past: Brewdog were once, quite literally, poster boys in the genre of mental health, in the sense that they literally did up posters and marketing for an alcohol-free beer aimed specifically at the depressed. In 2022, they were forced to apologise after a group of workers accused them—and founder James Watt specifically—of mistreating staff, lying to the press, cutting corners on health and safety, and leaving employees “burnt out, afraid and miserable.” Shortly after this apology they launched SAD AF, a 0 percent beer with accompanying awareness campaign.
The Future…? SORRY AF, a new 0 percent lager that is actually just water, designed to evaporate and eventually return to fall on our heads as rain, so that a Brewdog apology is always circulating somewhere in the atmosphere.
