BrewDog DogHouse – Travel back with me
You shouldn’t kick a dog when it’s down.
BrewDog is having an incredible year. Its founders have just been awarded MBEs for “services to the brewing industry”. The cheeky chappies – famous for their crazy stunts and zany adverts – have restarted their bitter feud with Guinness, continuing their fight against the rapacious global corporations pumping out joyless beers to chain pubs and supermarkets. They’ve called beer marketing “bollocks”.
They’ve also recently teamed up with Edinburgh charity Social Bite to create a beer that gives 100% of its profits to charity, and are about launch many more socially conscious initiatives which definitely won’t go wrong. After all, why not give a little back? Last year, revenue shot up by over 50% to £44.7m. This year UK sales are set to jump by 97%. And all this started by two normal blokes in a garage with just a sailor’s cap and a dream.
Yes, co-founder James Watt has come across as a bit of a twat in a recent TV programme described as a “brand car crash”. But he’s brushed it off as “a bit of a disaster” while one of his staff has blamed the BBC for editing the show badly. James will obviously make sure his public reputation is squeaky clean from now on.
Sorry, I was stuck in 2016 for a moment there. Just like DogHouse Edinburgh.
Exposed pipework, long wooden benches, distressed steel joists, exposed brickwork. We’ve seen it all before, most other places have moved on, but Brewdog is still clinging on to the peak craft beer aesthetic which coincided with its heyday. I have never stayed in a DogHouse hotel, but the website advertises “epic” rooms with vinyl record players, beer fridges in the showers, guitars on the walls and pick’n’mix sweeties. It’s as if a mid-40s man wearing battered Vans, a flannel shirt and a beanie was asked to picture his perfect weekend.
Except people here look tired. No one is excited to be here. I look around, and most seem to be scrolling on their phones. Some middle-aged people in athleisure gear wander through and order a Bourbon. I speculate that they have stepped out of the train station, Googled “pub Edinburgh” and recognised the branding.1 They look like they are on their way back from a golfing weekend.
But it’s a hotel bar (yes, Brewdog has hotels) and it’s 30 seconds from the Royal Mile, so the downstairs is fairly busy. What’s shocking is that it’s not packed out, given there’s a promotion on for £2 pints. The whole upstairs section is empty. Yes, it’s the Sunday after the 2am Scotland game, but surely if any other pub in Edinburgh was selling pints that cheap, half the city would be flocking there.
There are some positives. The staff here are lovely. Brewdog beers are still kind of serviceable, though they have lost any sort of originality or excitement they once had. The World Cup is on the TVs, and we see 12 goals over two matches. There is a pleasant roof terrace where we catch the last rays of sunshine in between the two games. And – the reason I’m here – the cheap beer deal.2
Apart from that, we could be in any of the Brewdog bars left after the administration and subsequent takeover by American “cannabis and wellness leader” Tilray Brands. Fashion changes, tastes move on – but remember, it’s all cyclical. Perhaps in a decade or so, this sort of thing will be cool again. There might be life in the old dog yet. But sometimes, the most humane thing is to just put the thing out of its misery.
Where is it?
Where next?
If it’s somewhere near Waverley you’re after, The Jinglin’ Geordie isn’t a bad shout.
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The Chaser – Downfall
Being humbly passionate about the actual quality of your beer is infinitely cooler than increasingly desperate begs for recognition. Selling a stake to a private equity firm is, as has been pointed out countless times, not remotely punk whatsoever. The exposed piping, distressed wood and stools around high tables – found in every Brewdog bar – were most definitely not unique in that time of peak hipsterism. Years later, that monstrous and embarrassing bar at London Waterloo was a final humiliation to the company’s remaining defenders.
I wrote about Brewdog’s demise back in March when it was stripped for parts. That coincided with Innis & Gunn, another Scottish brewer which rode the 2000s/2010s wave of craft beer enthusiasm before it all came crashing down.
Brewdog and Innis & Gunn – Two breweries, one downfall
Both companies rode the craft beer hype, expanded, spread themselves too thin – and were sold off for parts.
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