Waiting for the Brewdog divorce settlement

The recent news about Brewdog isn't particularly encouraging. Even as a pessimist, it feels like an almost unfathomably bleak turn of events.

A little story: 

Brewdog were once, briefly, my favourite brewery. In their very early years, between 2008 and 2010, they put out some excellent beers, were at the forefront of a rise in high quality and experimntal brewing in the UK, and while they weren't exactly the pioneers they purported to be, they were major players, doing good things and I liked them a lot. 

That is why I put my money where my mouth was, and became one of the earliest 'Equity for Punks' investors. I spent, I think, £810 on three 'shares' back in, when was it? 2009? It was definitely the first wave of the EFP mania. 

And I regretted it almost immediately, because Brewdog - having taken my money - went in a very different direction to what I'd have liked.  Founder James Watt showed himself to be an absolutely massive bellend - no that's an understatement - a cuntishly borderline psychopath is probably closer to the mark.

 

The longest breakup 

They still made some good beers and weren't afraid to push boundaries and experiment - sometimes to the point of stupidity -  only they stopped doing cask altogether, which for me is an absloute dealbreaker. And they believed their own hype a bit too much, becoming a kind of fanboi cult that tried to rewrite (the end of) history and were happy to alienate people like me. You know, the serious drinkers who put them on the map in the first place!

By 2012, the company was effectively dead to me. Well, almost. There certainly wasn't much love left.

The one hope was that the company was growing exponentially, and even if I didn't personally like their policies and general attitude, some people - a lot of people - obviously did, and their business model appeared to be working. Brewdog bars (with no real ale) opening everywhere, overseas expansion, hotels with keg taps in the showers! Gimmickry for sure, but lucrative gimmickry maybe. 

The club is dead and we're all donkeys?

I was patiently waiting - for absolutely fucking ages - for the company to be floated or bought out, so I could get out. I'd been told the return on my investment would be a decent one, because share re-valuations and dilutions now meant that I owned 1500 of the things. I'd be looking at something in the £40-60k ballpark, if I just sat tight - and this was according to a professional investments expert! Yes, the way Brewdog had gone about things was a little unorthodox, but that was their trademark. Eventually it would all be worth it, even if it had taken 15 of my best years!

And now we find ourselves where we are. Still uncertain, and maybe there's a bit of hope, especially as I was one of the first in and my outlay was relatively low. But not the huge windfall I was all-but-promised.

The warning signs were arguably there on the last EFP 'Trading Day' - the very, very occasional one-off occasions when 'shareholders' got to buy and sell from each other. There was no selling market at all, and I wasn't able to sell a single thing.

A lot of of Social Media users now appear to be saying 'oh well, I never expected to get my money back - I just saw it as a members club and got lots of discounts and freebies'.

Well, yeah, that's fine if you drank a lot in Brewdog bars and actually bought into their caskless, cunty business ethos. You probably made savings greater than the cash you put in. Bully for you.  

But I probably went to a Brewdog Bar maybe once a year; twice at absolute most. I think I ordered online from them on two occasions ever. They got into Supermarkets and Wetherspoons, and I'd drink their beers from time to time, but they were just another 'fairly large' non-cask brewer as far I was concerned. Mega meh.  (In an almost irrelevant twist, my favourite canned beer of 2025 was one of theirs. Meh again.)

And if you're thinking that I was a fool for investing, you're right, but crucially they changed. They changed drastically after I had bought in. They pulled the rug from under me. 

And it's a bit disingenuous to now claim you don't have much skin in the game. Until a couple of years ago, everyone was widely expected to make a significant return on their investment, especially those of us who got in right at the start. 

For years I've been assured that this was the best/luckiest financial decision I ever made, I just had to wait.  

So we shall wait a while longer and see what happens.  Without a whole lot of hope, it has to be said. 

I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out to be the worst financial decision I ever made.