Free beer for life tattoo stunt, sparks fury over BrewDog bar.

The End of History – featuring dead animals – comes at £500 a bottle.

The above are just two headlines concerning BrewDog in the beer press this week.

The first headline sparked outrage with BrewDog apparently proposing free beer for life to anyone who gets their logo tattooed onto themselves as a promotional stunt at the opening of their first bar,  planned for Aberdeen in mid September.

The latter concerned a new brew by BrewDog at a staggering 55% ABV for sale online from £500 a bottle.  The beer is packaged in bottles inside stuffed animals and has been criticised as “perverse” and “pushing the boundaries of acceptability”. The bottles have been made using dead stoats, squirrels and a hare, said to be road kill. BrewDog claims the beer is the world’s strongest and most expensive.

Concerning the former headline, James Watt, co-founder and MD of BrewDog, said: “We’re going to have a tattoo artist in the pub on the opening night and we’re offering free beer for life to anyone who will have the BrewDog logo tattooed on their body. “I think that we might get the tattoos ourselves – it only seems fair if we’re expecting other people to want to do the same.”

Aberdeen City Licensing Board, have said: “We’re not currently aware of any promotion that would allow someone to have a lifetime’s supply of free beer in exchange for a tattoo………… I don’t think that any licensing board would consider this promotion to be encouraging responsible drinking ………. and in terms of the law I would have thought that this offer would not be considered a responsible promotion. “It’s one thing after another with these guys, it’s quite astounding.”

The Scottish Licensed Trade Association has also slammed the proposed stunt as “abhorrent”. And the president of the SLTA, has said: “I would have to question whether such a stunt is entirely legal. “The Licensing (Scotland) Act 2005 comes down very strongly on licensed premises that offer incentives to customers that may encourage them to act irresponsibly”.

Some clarification subsequently appeared on BrewDog’s website, as follows:  It has been reported in the Sun, Scotsman and Edinburgh Evening News and on some websites that we will be offering free beer for life to anyone who gets a BrewDog tattoo on the opening day of our Aberdeen pub. This is not an accurate report and not a fair reflection of our position here. We are considering, subject to compatibility with Scottish licensing laws, offering one or two free beers per week for life for anyone who gets a BrewDog tattoo at the pub (we may have a tattoo artist there) on the opening day. Now this of course is a very different proposition to the ‘free beer for life’ which the press went with in order to sensationalize things.   

Concerning the second headline, Advocates for Animals director Libby Anderson told the BBC Scotland news website: “It’s pointless and very negative to use dead animals when we should be celebrating live animals.”This seems to be a perverse idea. She added: “I think the public would not waste £500 on something so gruesome and just ignore it.”

Barbara O’Donnell, director of services at Alcohol Focus Scotland, said: “This is another example of this company pushing the boundaries of acceptability all in the pursuit of cheap marketing tactics.”

Well Ms Libby Anderson couldn’t have been more wrong; apparently all twelve bottles available sold within a few hours of going on sale.

The above is all grist to the mill for BrewDog and their use of negative publicity to achieve levels of brand recognition that other companies would kill for.  

BrewDog’s response – a recommendation that such beers should be served in a shot or whisky glass ”to be enjoyed like a fine whisky” and “This artisan beer should be consumed in small servings whilst exuding an endearing pseudo vigilance and reverence for Mr. Stoat and “The real catalysts for a binge-drinking culture are not well-crafted beers but the monolithic corporate machines that have cultivated a culture of quantity rather than quality amongst UK beer drinkers.”

I first became aware of BrewDog in 2008 when the whole thing around Tokyo, their 18% ABV beer blew up, after a complaint was made to the Portman Group about the phrase “intergalactic fantastic” hinting at the use of hallucinogens.

James Watt or Emperor Penguin, as apparently he prefers to be known, at this time asked several well known bloggers if they would write in defence of Tokyo. Several did and it made a lot of online and print media. These bloggers included Zak Avery whose take on it and analogy was that strong beer is about as responsible for drunkenness as Michelin-starred restaurants are responsible for obesity, which I believe to be right and true and he along with several others supported BrewDog.

It subsequently came out that it was James Watt himself who had complained to the Portman Group about the wording on the labels. The bloggers had simply been made pawns in their publicity machine. They stitched themselves up deliberately over Tokyo and whilst some people congratulated them on a point well proved the majority bemoaned their tactics and deception. I certainly thought at the time what a total f……  arsehole the guy must be.

However what you cannot ignore about James Watt and BrewDog is their total self-belief. It’s not enough for them just to brew beer – they also want to be the coolest kids on the block. Basically if you’re not down with BrewDog, it’s because you just don’t get it.  I don’t agree with it but you cannot ignore it. For them, it’s not enough to just like their beers – you’ve got to buy into the whole BrewDog image as well. They’re not selling beer – they’re selling a lifestyle, an attitude, a cult brand and if you don’t like it, then you’re part of the problem.

I say cult because there is something dogmatic about following BrewDog, as I’ve no doubt that many people hold BrewDog in high esteem. Much the same way they look forward to their favourite bands latest album or the next big book by their favourite author, people will wait in keen anticipation of every move BrewDog make, regardless of what that move might be.

Now, with The End of History, BrewDog has installed themselves as favourites for the Turner Prize of the beer world. They know that for as long as they can create controversy, they will make the front pages. 

However in my opinion the likes of BrewDog and other “sexy brewers” now appear to be driven by the need to innovate by reinventing beer with wild and exiting ingredients and processes. Beer made with good quality malt and hops which tastes of beer is no longer cool. To be good these brewers now think good beer must be brewed with 10kilos of hops per pint, be spiced with the pubic hairs of a Slovakian virgin, fermented to 40% ABV in a particle accelerator, before being matured for 4 years in an old scotch whisky cask covered in Manx Shearwater guano recovered from South Stack Lighthouse, but only at the time of a full moon.  It also helps if the beer is then called; Greek sex and a banana skin.

I’m all for innovation but only when it makes great beer. There seems to be a growing band of beer enthusiasts who now seek difference purely for difference’s sake and for whom the process seems to be more important than the end product. And I really do believe that if we carry on like this then the world of beer as we know it, is at risk of becoming like the world of art where the top prize (Turner Prize) is awarded to what the vast majority of ordinary folk consider to be complete and utter shite.

There are many reasons to be irritated by BrewDog generally, however my main beef with them is that they are now so busy arseing around with 55%ABV quintuple ice cream factory frozen beers that they appear to have taken their eye of the ball in other directions and are or will lose the plot. They are not concentrating on their other beers where they struggle to keep up with demand say with Punk IPA which accounts for about 55% of sales and Trashy Blonde both of which in fact and it peeves me to say it, are rather good.

It must surely be bleeding obvious to BrewDog that the majority of decent folk will find beer in a stuffed animal to be distasteful. No-one, surely, believes BrewDog’s assertion that they did it to honour the animal – they did it for the publicity, not for the squirrel or the stoat, but purely to promote themselves.

Changing tack slightly here, I love women. Of the two sexes on this planet, if ever there was a vote to decide which sex should remain I’d tick the box for the female of the species. Everything about them is great; their caring and gentle personality, the way they look, and smell and the way they know exactly how to manipulate us males into doing exactly what they want.

Now having said the above, we all know in fact they are far from perfect and the first time this shows they are not so, is their teenage years and in particular their fashion and boyfriend choices.  At this age some young ladies tend to have very little style, and what they do have, is fleeting. It is understandable, they are experimenting, both with boys and fashion, seeing what they like, what they don’t and what works.  And with time, and after a few disasters, both fashion and boy related our teenager find’s herself. This is when they calm down a touch; finally turn up with a half decent boyfriend and blend a bit of practical with glamorous fashion into one overall image that they then adopt as their own style.

I think this is BrewDog, they are just trying things to see if the beers they make work and they can then take them home to meet Dad.  However what you can’t accuse BrewDog’s beers, nor a young girl’s taste in clothes and boyfriend’s, of being, is dull.

They make some ‘normal’ beers, for example Trashy Blonde, 77 Lager and Punk IPA, all not bad beers for the styles, but for BrewDog these are not interesting enough;  they are akin to our teenager in her school uniform. They try to make things a bit more interesting by giving her jewellery, piercing her nose and unbuttoning her blouse as much as they can get away with, but her clothes are still the same as everyone else’s. BrewDog make this standard range a bit more interesting by brewing these beers with more bang for your bucks, but it is still a “regular” range, but as mainstream beers go; a range with a bit of boob on show!

The beers they are more interested in as a pubescent teenager are their craft beers. These offer some fairly unique styles and often in limited numbers.

I first came across and tried these at the time of Sainsbury 2009 Bottled Beer Competition when All Gates had Porteresque in the final and BrewDog had three of their beers,  Dogma, Hardcore IPA and Chaos Theory. None of theirs were winners and in fact came in below our own Porteresque; despite what we thought at the time was an unfair marketing tactic. This involved via their website encouraging their fans to go into Sainsbury and buy I think 20 of their beers, to take a photograph of themselves with the beers; Email it to BrewDog and they would then send three more bottles of a new beer for free. Whilst not outside the rules of the competition it was certainly outside the spirit.

Take their Dogma which is a reincarnation of Speedball, the heather honey infused beer that gave BrewDog their first really big PR piece. It is a 7.8% ABV red amber beer brewed with Guarana (normally found in energy drinks), poppy seeds (from the same source as opium) and kola nut (normally used to treat whooping cough), and then blended with Scottish heather honey.  With the beer you get the heather honey sweetness up front, it is I recall quite floral and with some bitter orange and a bit of cocoa but an acquired taste; the complex flavors are interesting but I didn’t actually like the guarana tang .

I think it was Reluctant Scooper who described a bottle of Dogma at the time as tasting like an “apothecary’s floor sweepings that have been suspended in caramel”. Wonderful.

Hardcore IPA had been around for a while pre the Sainsbury competition and at 9.0% ABV is a beer that has a little bit of ‘wow’ factor. It has a crazy, pre 2003 flavour change, Um Bongo, “They drink it in the Congo” aroma that’s sweet and exciting. Fruit salad and Haribo sweet smells give way to a bitter overload with hops completely dominating.  Hardcore has the strength but its hidden treasures are perhaps just a little too inaccessible.

Chaos Theory – Complexity in the universe is often based on simple, fundamental rules. We don’t know all of the rules but we understand some of them; however despite this, life is still an unpredictable and seemingly a random existence.  With this beer BrewDog would have us believe this is what they did, that they couldn’t predict the exact end result and that consistency and the quality in a brew can be more difficult than just throwing the ingredients together and sticking the heat on.

Chaos Theory at 7.1% IPA was a deep copper colour and had aromas of tropical fruit and if I can recall an added depth and was I think originally a prototype, winning a vote to enter permanent production. I thought it was rather good too so strange then that it is no longer brewed. Maybe it was our teenager’s first shag, and she didn’t enjoy it.

Then there is the Paradox range.  A while back whisky distillers came up with the idea of putting the same whisky in different barrels to show how the oak changes the taste of the spirit. It was also a way of course of extending the parameters of relevance of the whisky brands. BrewDog have followed this by creating one stout and ageing it in whisky barrels from three different producers.

From the Isle of Arran is, well, Arran aged Paradox. Initially I found this beer to be quite sweet on the nose and the palate all about dried fruit and bitter chocolate. It was shite.  From Campbeltown, is the Springbank aged ale. A total contrast from the Arran, as this had a rich, sweet, malty aroma with loads of chocolate and raisins. A good palate, a mix of bitter and sweet, with leather and anti macassa on the finish. Really rather good!

Third in this range is Smokehead Paradox. Smokehead is an Islay single malt whisky brand but nobody (officially) knows which distillery produces the whisky. It is a very rich seaweedy and heavily peaty flavoured whisky. Like Brew Dog, Smokehead has brash, for the whisky industry, packaging, and has an image that sticks two fingers firmly up at the established Scottish distilleries.  So, in theory, this could have been the right boyfriend – two like minded contemporary teens. However the resulting beer is far from a long term relationship, more a one night stand and quick shag in the back of his Subaru. Desperate stuff.

Throughout their teenage years, girls simply can’t afford designer clothes. Sure, they can get the odd nice pair of shoes or jeans, but Jimmy Choo’s and Armani’s are not going to be in their wardrobe. Then, once they have got a job, they save up, buy a pair of designer shoes or jeans that they wear once and then put to one side until they post them on Ebay… to fund the purchase of their next pair! BrewDog has decided to follow this theory too, and are producing beers that not only push the boundaries of beer making tradition, but also pricing.

First was Atlantic IPA. After apparently finding a 210 year old recipe for a hoppy Indian Pale Ale, the decision was made to strap a number of barrels of this beer to James’ dad’s North Atlantic trawler for two months at sea, making it, BrewDog claimed the first sea aged IPA available for two centuries. Needless to say, its £20 price tag was thought a tad high for something that, to the majority of people, was comparable to say Deuchars IPA. But to compare this to Caledonian’s product is akin to comparing Uma Thurman to Una thingy. They may be similar sounding, but one is a Hollywood star and the other is an actress, that you used to remember as been ok but now you can’t recall what she was like. I never tasted Atlantic so can’t comment on its quality or otherwise.

However as Martin Cornell’s excellent blog Zythophile subsequently pointed out what then were Bass, Allsopp, Hodgson and the rest doing in the 19th century, if this was indeed the first sea aged IPA for over two hundred years. Here’s a Cornelius O’Sullivan, head brewer at Bass, one of the great Burton export pale ale brewers, giving evidence to a parliamentary inquiry in only 1899.

“Do you export beer in the cask to places like India?” C O’S: “Yes.”  “Which do you do most of exporting in cask or in bottle?”  C O’S: “We sell no beer in bottle. We export a considerable quantity of bulk beer in cask to India and also to Australia and America, not so much to Australia now but still what we send we export in cask. A large quantity of our beer is bottled by exporters and exported: we sell them the beer and they bottle it and export it.”
“Your beer goes out to India in casks?” C O’S: “Yes.”

So Atlantic IPA was certainly not, as BrewDog claimed, “the first commercially available, genuine sea-aged IPA in two centuries” – far from it. Nor can they have used “a 210-year-old recipe of a traditional India Pale Ale”, since there was no such thing as India Pale Ale in 1799: the name India Pale Ale did not come into use for another 30+ years and what brewers were exporting at the time to India was almost certainly a standard strongly hopped stock bitter. 

I would also suggest it a bit cheeky of BrewDog to imply that two months on a North Atlantic trawler in any way replicates the four months or more voyage of an East Indiaman sailing vessel going round the Cape of Good Hope and crossing the equator twice.

And then came Tokyo; this was the beer that caused the Portman Group to accuse BrewDog of encouraging people to drink to excess. It is an 18%ABV beer and costs £10 per 330ml bottle. The beer is brewed with jasmine and cranberries and then aged on oak chips. Again I have not tasted this concoction having never felt the need to splash out a tenner of my hard earned money.

But then things started getting real crazy with the now infamous Tactical Nuclear Penguin. Not only is it £35 for a 330ml bottle, but it’s 32%ABV made it, when first launched, the then strongest beer ever. This beer started as an 11% stout, and was aged in whisky barrels for between 14-18 months according to what and who you read, before being taken to an ice cream factory and freeze distilled. The water in the beer freezes before the alcohol, and so you get a sort of beer Slush Puppy with a concentrated alcoholic liquid at the bottom of the tank. This liquid, is then decanted and refrozen a few times and becomes Tactical Nuclear Penguin.  And despite all the above, the beer is by all accounts shite. 

Then came a 40% ABV beer,by some German brewers. So BrewDog retaliated with Sink the Bismarck, a quadruple IPA containing four times the hops, four times the bitterness of Tactical Nuclear Penguin and frozen four times to create a staggering 41% ABV beer. This is available at £40 per bottle for 330cl but comes with a free stopper.  Great! Again I have resisted the temptation to buy, but I suspect it is also shite.

Now we have the End of History at 55%ABV from £500.00 per bottle and then just last Thursday BrewDog announced yet another new beer, I Hardcore You.

The latter is a 9.5% IPA brewed collaboratively with www.mikkeller.dk being a blend of BrewDog’s Hardcore IPA and Mikkeller’s I Beat You.  The beers were apparently blended together then dry hopped twice making the beer 4 times dry hopped! As far as BrewDog are aware this is the first collaboration of this type anywhere in the world. It is said to be a one off brew with a small amount available for a limited time only.

So this is the precocious teenager that BrewDog is. She will try anything, spend all her pocket money experimenting, having failures and successes.  But like our teenager, BrewDog will one day grow up and will realise that although its youth was fun, it will have to get serious, get a job, make some money and their business and beers, a bit less radical.  They will also have to tread a more careful line as they grow in the multiples, in that their image of “we are punks and don’t give a shit for the establishment” is hypocritical considering they sell their products in Asda, Tesco, Sainsbury etc!

And I honestly think that time is fast approaching. It goes back to their share offering in October 2009 – Equity for Punks!  and in particular on events just before the offering. Back then they offered 10,000 shares for £230 each which I think at the time would have valued the company at £25.0M+, this for a company that if you had looked at the documents would have told you they had sold a 12.5% stake to Griffin Group LLC for £600k only four months earlier, which deal valued the company then at £4.8m. The company had at the time of the offer an annual turnover of only £1.3M and was not turning a profit. In the end only about 2,700 shares were sold. Good if you can get it I thought at the time but certainly not an investment for me.

The interesting bit is Griffin Group LLC which is an investment and consulting company focused on alcohol brands, operated by Keith Greggor and Tony Foglio, two San Francisco residents who made their fortunes from Skyy Vodka. These two are no doubt hardnosed businessmen and they won’t have invested their hard earned cash in BrewDog to see it pissed away on the high seas. They only have a minority stake but will I guess carry a good deal of sway.

Very quietly back in April 2010 these two guys acquired the iconic San Francisco Anchor Brewing Company, with its craft beers and artisan spirits, the former including the award winning Anchor Steam Beer and subsequently established Anchor Brewers & Distillers LLC.

Anchor Brewers & Distillers apparently intends to establish a “Centre of Excellence” in San Francisco for craft brewers and artisan distillers from around the world. “San Francisco is the perfect place to establish this centre,” said Tony Foglio, “Through our extensive portfolio of craft beers and fine spirits our focus will be to educate and satisfy the increasing consumer demand for authentic, quality and natural products that reflect the passion of their creators.”

Interestingly an affiliate is BrewDog USA, LLC, the US division of BrewDog.

So with these guys having now splashed out substantially more of their hard earned dollars on an iconic brewery in their own back yard we have to assume that this is where their main interests and efforts will lie for the moment, it may be a case with BrewDog either they will have to shape up and make money and fairly quickly or Greggor & Foglio will move on.

BrewDog’s latest accounts for 2009 reveal a small profit of just £147. At the same time, turnover more than doubled to £1.8M compared with £0.78M in 2008. Profits of £350k are forecast for this year. The first six months of this year have apparently seen revenues increase some 230pc compared to the same period last year. BrewDog has also secured planning permission for a new sustainable brewery in Aberdeen, which will boost its current capacity of 8 million bottles a year to 30 million by the end of 2012, giving the business room to grow revenues even further.

The company currently produces 400,000 – 500,000 bottles a month, with the off-trade representing 75pc of its UK sales,and exports  60% of overall sales.  As the proposed opening of their Aberdeen bar now shows, clearly BrewDog wants a bigger slice of the on-trade for its bottles and casks so as to be less reliant on the low margin bottled market and multiples.  If they are to be successful then I would suggest they need to steer well away from their headline-grabbing ale strengths and irresponsible names as responsible social drinking is too-important an issue to ignore, even for BrewDog.

BrewDog has learned that dealing with the multiples is terrific in terms of volume and brand recognition but always comes at the cost of margin. It can also put pressure on working capital. My guess is that they are earning a contribution or gross profit on each bottle of 15-18p at best and from that they need to cover all overheads, borrowing costs etc. and most importantly for them fund their expansion.

So I really believe for their medium and long term future, no survival then BrewDog needs to concentrate on where it makes money, which it to produce their beers with a bit of boob, but every so often, and only occasionally mind, put on their Jimmy Choo’s and that little black dress and produce their eccentric and unique beers. Some will be good, some may be shite, none of them will ever be more than a passing trend, but they will at least continue to showcase the innovative and slightly mad spirit of BrewDog.

Tags: Anchor Brewing Company, Asda, Banana skin, BrewDog, Greek sex, Griffin Group LLC, James Watt, Jimmy Choo's, Portman Group, Profit, Reluctant Scooper, Sainsbury, Tesco, Turner Prize, Um Bongo

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 31st, 2010 at 6:04 pm and is filed under Micro Breweries. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.