Why We Do What We Do

Infamous? Unpredictable? Entirely responsible for the downfall of Western civilization? Maybe. BrewDog has courted its fair share of controversy since we set out in ’07 to excite imaginations and challenge bored British palates, but despite all the apparent chaos, what we do is part of a much bigger mission.

Martin Dickie and I were tired of the industrially brewed lagers and stuffy ales that dominated the UK market. Having given up hope of finding beers we actually enjoyed, we started making our own. Following a couple of years of ramshackle home brewing, we had the privilege of meeting Michael Jackson, who tried our garage-brews and promptly told us to quit our jobs and start making beer. So we did. Both only 24 at the time, we leased a building, got some scary bank loans, spent all our money on stainless steel and started making some hardcore beers.

The UK is a desert for progressive craft beer, dominated by monolithic lagers and generic ales. CAMRA (Campaign for Real Ale) is almost single-handedly responsible for holding back innovation in British brewing with their overbearing emphasis on a narrow spectrum of pretty uncreative beer styles. Most British small brewers do nothing to further the craft beer revolution; specifically, those brewers who flood the market with dull, steady, fundamentally uninspiring brown beers, on a flavor spectrum defined by a 3.5 percent Mild and a 4 percent bitter, with their branding created in some demented vacuum of taste and logic. Contrast this with America, where uninhibited, challenging and innovative craft beers are flourishing. Unconstrained by tradition, craft brewers are free to follow their muse, boldly riffing on the “rebellious,” anticorporate nature of artisan beer brewing to boot.

For us, everything comes back to one overarching ambition and one guiding light: to make other people as passionate about great craft beer as we are. We want to show people there is an alternative to monotonous corporate brews, introduce them to a completely new approach to beer while elevating the status of beer in our culture. Drinkers in Scotland are constrained by lack of choice, seduced by the monolithic corporate brewers’ huge advertising budgets and brainwashed by vindictive lies perpetrated with the intensity of pseudo-propaganda. They can’t help but be sucked down the rabbit hole. We are on a mission to open as many people’s eyes as possible. This is what motivates us, and this is why we love brewing progressive ales. Whether we’re wrangling with industry regulators, pushing the boundaries in high-ABV brewing, smashing bottles of generic beer with a baseball bat or doing a Saturday morning tasting at a local street market, we live and breathe craft brewing and everything we do comes back to aspiring to brew world-class ales and striving to instigate a local craft beer revolution.

At times, it may seem like BrewDog is shouting too loudly; however, the unforgiving territories of windswept North Scotland have a lot in common with the landscape that greets any UK craft brewer—we’re simply shouting loud enough to be heard. We want to put craft beer on the map, show people how rewarding properly brewed beer can be and redefine perceptions of what beer is truly about. We feel that by inciting controversy, unsettling institutions and really pushing the envelope, we can raise awareness for craft beer in the UK and get more dispassionate consumers starting the journey toward becoming bona fide craft beer aficionados. Simply generating headlines makes people aware that there is an alternative approach to beer. Oh, and our dog, Bracken, just loves wearing his penguin suit. ■