ohDear BrewDog.
A case of “How could the situation get worse?” And then she did it.
In a letter to staff, chief executive James Brown said all new workers would now receive £11.44 an hour nationwide – the national living wage. That means pay for bar staff outside London will rise by around 5 per cent. Doesn't that sound so bad? It also means staff in London will have their hourly pay frozen, a pay cut in real terms.
Apparently, a “unique bonus scheme” including an extra £1 per hour if they exceed customer service standards for that month and a “paternity” leave, offered by a BrewDog spokesperson after the news broke, failed to soften the blow. bang. In a city facing higher-than-average costs of living and rents double the national average, staff were understandably furious.
Brown said it was a “difficult decision” they had to make in the face of a business loss in 2023. Could that have something to do with a series of other missteps lately, perhaps? For example, losing its B Corp status after complaints about a workplace “culture of fear”, facing criticism for its “hypocritical” stance on the 2022 World Cup (for the same reasons) and one of its founders being accused of behavior inappropriate. which he denies. Oh, and also the beer is pretty bad.
Outlandish marketing stunts and a penchant for breaking the rules used to be what made BrewDog stand out. In reality, it's still what makes them stand out, albeit for much more dire reasons.
BrewDog's introduction of a beer served from taxidermied animals ruffled a few feathers with its 55 per cent strength and £500 price tag and… well, its delivery.
(Universal News and Sports)
It all started in 2007, when craft brewing (and white men with a “let's fuck off” attitude) was cool and unobtrusive. Fed up with the UK beer market, Martin Dickie and James Watt founded BrewDog in a small fishing port in the north east of Scotland, when they were just 24 years old. With the help of some scary bank loans, they started brewing small batches, filling bottles by hand and selling their first beers at local markets out of a beat-up old van. It was a very “them against us” spirit; us, the independent rebels standing up to them, the boardroom breweries. It all sounds very noble. Oh, how the tables turn. They often do.
But it worked. A deal with Tesco got them off the ground, they rolled up their sleeves and started with what they really came here to do. Make noise and irritate people.
The loudest and most memorable of these was probably a campaign called The End of History, in which huge bottles of 55 percent ABV beer were stuffed into the necks of stuffed roadkill. The strongest and most expensive beer in the world (£500-700) at the time, via stout carcasses, squirrels and hares. This was a gift to the top 10 devotees in the US who had invested more than $20,000 in the company. How nice. If only I had invested! I'm sad that I missed the deer head dispenser that arrived a year later. Or the stuffed cats that were dropped over the City of London from a helicopter to celebrate another crowdfunding campaign.
Theirs were loud and proud campaigns, much to the chagrin of the Portman Group, a social responsibility body for alcohol in the UK (they have some of the British antipathy towards anything remotely funny about them). They first accused BrewDog of using aggressive marketing tactics, or rather simply pointed them out. BrewDog won the case and in response launched Speedball – referring to a drug cocktail – to “give them something worth banning us for.” It was and was renamed Dogma. I wonder what they will call their response to this latest criticism. The cost of not giving a shit? Does poverty spread? BrewDog, send me a private message. There was also an uproar in Tokyo because BrewDog claimed to have produced the strongest beer ever made, at 18.2 percent. Once again, they responded by launching the 32 percent Tactical Nuclear Penguin, and later the 41 percent Sink the Bismarck. They never miss an opportunity, right?
The company's campaign to introduce two-thirds measures in pubs failed with surprisingly little reaction.
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Some campaigns seemed just for fun. There was a time when Dickie and Watt (not a decisive comedy duo) drove a tank down Camden High Street to announce their first opening south of the border. Or when they brought out the Royal Virility Performance for Prince William and Kate's wedding, a beer that contained Viagra and horny goat weed. After an awards snub, they projected an image of themselves naked except for a single BrewDog beer on the Houses of Parliament. To promote their Elvis Juice, Dickie and Watt attempted (and failed) to legally change their names via Deed Poll to Elvis. They also hired a person with dwarfism to set up shop outside Westminster for a week with a sign saying “Size Matters” to campaign for two-thirds measures in pubs. Surprisingly, it worked and no one had much to say about it.
Other campaigns leaned more politically. Portman returned in 2014 to attack BrewDog for encouraging “antisocial behavior and rapid drinking.” Not really? In response to Russian laws to address what they called gay “propaganda,” BrewDog released Hello My Name is Vladimir with an image of the Russian president saying it was “not for gays” before the Sochi Winter Olympics. Sticking with the sport, they also launched a hibiscus lager dedicated to Sepp Blatter as an unofficial bid for Scotland to host the 2022 World Cup. It came with the instructions: “Best served in brown paper envelopes for help drink and with greased palms”, in reference to the dubious dealings of the FIFA president.
But the mask of awakened brewers with a purpose to highlight began to slip. In a crowdfunding ad, Dickie and Watt dressed up as sex workers. A petition claiming the video mocked sex workers and transgender women garnered more than 36,000 signatures. The launch of Pink IPA, a limited-edition bottle of its best-selling beer, coincided with International Women's Day and was intended to highlight the gender pay gap with the phrase… wait for it… “Beer for girls” and a 20 percent discount for anyone who identifies as a woman. The Portman Group responded and ruled that it had violated its code of conduct. BrewDog said: “We are as concerned about this ruling by the Portman Group as any other – which is to say, not at all.”
Full of energy: BrewDog founders made their entrance when they opened their first English bar – literally
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Everything that goes up has to go down. BrewDog's rise had been aggressive, loud and at times witty. It is logical that his fall is also. Years of bad behavior began to take a toll on them. In 2021, a group of more than 100 former BrewDog employees published an open letter accusing the company of fostering a “culture of fear” in which workers were bullied and “treated like objects.” The letter claimed the Scottish brewer had taken shortcuts on health and safety, made promises it did not keep and created a “toxic” culture that left some employees suffering from mental illness. “Unfortunately, being treated like a human being was not always a given for those who work at BrewDog,” the letter alleges. There was no new beer deliberately named in retaliation, but rather a kind of apology and then a warning: that the accusations represented a “threat to all our livelihoods.”
A year later, BrewDog was the subject of a BBC. Divulgation episode, in which former employees interviewed said working there was a “miserable and uncomfortable experience” and some customers said “they regret investing their savings in BrewDog.” The Guardian He later revealed that Watt had hired private investigators to obtain information about people he believed were spreading a smear campaign against him.
This obviously led to criticism of BrewDog's “anti-sponsorship” of the 2022 FIFA World Cup, in which they attacked Qatar for its mistreatment of migrant workers and criminalization of homosexuality. By the end of the year, BrewDog had lost its B Corp status, which provides certification of a company's ethical commitment to the environment, community and staff, although a B Lab spokesperson could not comment on why. Not that we needed them.
Needless to say, these antics do not make BrewDog immune to the rising costs affecting businesses in the industry: rising energy bills, as well as rising prices for hops, malt, carbon dioxide, cans, bottles and containers. The company reported an operating loss of £24 million in 2022, and although we won't see results for 2023 until later this year, the company's comments on the latest news indicate that it could be on a downward spiral: “Even with this strong performance over Christmas, as a wider business, we cannot hide the fact that in 2023 we made a trading loss and despite many efforts over the last 12 months to reduce our spending, we still need to find more ways to get this business back to normal. profitable”.
But it does not look good. Nothing says it better than a 2015 company Twitter video criticizing the biggest drinks companies for buying into the British craft beer boom, in which Watt says: “Megacorporations worry about costs, share of market, dividends and valuations. “They don’t care about beer.” Sure, but does BrewDog care about its people?
