Not necessarily because entry to the Irish pub scene was so important – but because it came at a point when the company’s valuation had reached dizzying heights.
But despite having been worth well over £1 billion as recently as a decade ago, BrewDog was this month taken over for a mere £33 million.
The brand and some of its pubs – including Dublin – remain, but it still marks a dramatic fall from grace for what was once a leader in the craft beer market.BrewDog was first established in 2007 by James Watt and Martin Dickie – they were two school friends who ended up living together while studying at university.
James was studying law and economics while Martin studied brewing and distilling – and that interest quickly rubbed off on James.
They started home-brewing and, after graduating from university, the idea of forming a beer company began to grow in their minds.
And this was happening at an important time.
While the craft beer movement had been around in one form or another for decades, in the early 2000s, it was enjoying a minor boom. That was helped by a number of factors – including greater consumer awareness (particularly online), easier access to beers from around the world and a growing cohort of customers looking for something different.
In the UK in particular, the craft market was given a major boost by then chancellor Gordon Brown, who in 2002 eased the alcohol duties for those making less than 3 million litres of beer a year.
So by the mid-to-late 2000s, there were lots of older craft beer brands that were making the most of their new advantage, and newer ones trying to carve out a place in this expanding market.
And Scotland-based BrewDog became one of those scrappy start-ups.
It started life with a very romantic story of a plucky up-start – with Watt and Dickie scraping together the money they had, managing to secure a £20,000 loan and using that to lease a decrepit garage, which they stocked with second hand brewing that they’d picked up cheap. (Though that story is dampened somewhat by the fact, which emerged later, that Watt is the son of a millionaire.)
Still, though, the two had to put hard work in to create and then try and promote their first beer – Punk IPA – which ultimately became their flagship product.
By their account, it wasn’t going well at first – with trips to and from farmers’ markets in an old Fiat Punto apparently not leading to much in the way of sales.
But things suddenly turned around for them when they entered – and won – a competition for food and drinks brands held by Tesco.
The prize for that was being stocked in every Tesco in the UK – which saw BrewDog go from almost no sales, to a monthly order that was twice the size of what they were able to produce.
And that became the foundation for the company’s rapid growth.
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