Are pints 'content'?
Hello,
It’s been an entertaining few weeks for those of us who fucking love schadenfreude. An article in the Financial Times exposed a mathematically disastrous deal Brewdog’s founders did in 2017 that’s left all their Equity for Punks investors with losses and gifted 67% (and continuously rising year-on-year) of the company’s value to a private equity firm who only paid for 22.3%.
I feel very sorry for the people who invested in Equity for Punks. At the time, Brewdog seemed like kind of a fun and cool thing that if you liked beer you might want to support and it’s been nothing if not a decade-and-a-half of people who wouldn’t muck about on the stock market but are happy to invest in stuff they like, rarely for any reward. Just take the case of publisher Unbound’s massive abuse of trust, for instance.
Both of these things suck because of how badly they’ve screwed over well-meaning people. The entertainment to be had, in Brewdog’s case, is at the expense of co-founder and media personality (where the personality is ‘guy who sucks’) James Watt.
There are few more guilt-free pleasures than laughing at the total lack of business acumen of a guy who proclaims himself a business genius. So much so he’s helming a show where he coaches startups to become ‘unicorns’ - getting a billion dollar valuation.
Which is exactly what he and co-found Martin Dickie were doing when they sold 22.3% of the company for enough money to get that brief, $1 billion valuation at the low, low cost of 18% more of the value of the company every year, without paying for (or getting) any additional shares. Yes, I had to get someone to explain this to me but even before then I was thinking some sort of deal where one investors shares bloated in value while everyone else’s fell sounded like a real bad idea.
Of course, if the company had just infinitely grown in value forever then they wouldn’t have had to worry about this. However, even the sudden braking event on Tesla’s share price shows that no startup’s overinflated value can actually compete with The Big Bang in terms of having enough hot air to permanently grow without resistance or limitation.
Anyway, I’m sorry to hear that Brewdog’s pathetic financial acumen has led to it needing to close 10 bars in the UK because I don’t want any pubs to close and I don’t want hospitality staff to lose jobs. I do think, if we had to lose some, Brewdog’s gaffes should be first against the wall, though. Charmless, with well-documented abuse of workers and poor treatment of customers, they’re hardly the bastions of community and homes for the lost that thousands of other pubs represent.
At the end of the day, Brewdog’s bars were never about running good bars they were there (and still are, across the globe as well as in the UK) as stunt-ish pop-up marketing exercises to convince people the brand really was that edgy. I’ll give them credit where it’s due, they really did actually do the best buffalo cauliflower I’ve ever had and I still sometimes think about it but that doesn’t redeem a thousand sins the first of which is conflating the concept of a pub with being a goddamn fucking brand.
Look, I know that pubs are goddamn fucking brands. Especially chain pubs. Especially breweries, of course breweries are brands. My pub hasn’t been owned by Courage for absolutely donkey’s years but I still take great joy in the two massive shiny cock(erel)s I have erected on the signs outside, after a fella gave them a jolly good polish.
I know that literally everything is like this these days because otherwise you can’t get investment into your startup or assure the c-suite in shareholder confidence or whatever the fuck. And that all of those things are more important than even having any water left to boil a frog in once ChatGPT’s done.
When I say “being a goddamn fucking brand” I mean having a clubcard scheme. Ok, they didn’t call it that - it’s BrewDog Treats. You know, a little one, for the horrors. Not to sound like a hoary old sourpuss but when pubs say we’re struggling to compete with supermarkets, the search to drive loyalty through QR code sign ups wasn’t what most of us were thinking.
I’d also argue a lot of their promotions are irresponsible. Free pint on sign up; fine, plenty of places do that sort of thing in order to get you on an email list. But last week from Tuesday-Friday there was a deal for unlimited pints of Wingman session IPA at £1. I’ve seen other ones that put the prices of beer cheaper the hotter the weather went.
Those aren’t licensee-led ideas. They’re not beer industry led ideas, either. Selling pints at what has to be a loss, post-logistics and staffing (even if you allow for the fact it’s BrewDog selling the beer to its own bars, hopefully cheaply*) with no limit on the number of those pints seems kinda wrong. And yes, I know I used to work for Spoons.
Spoons don’t sell stuff at a loss, although the margin’s sometimes very small when cask ale’s being dispensed with. I do think (and did say to the company when I worked there) that some of their Monday Club pricing is irresponsible. I am not here to defend £1.49 pints of Worthington or 38.5% spirits at £1.99.
In some sense Brewdog’s offers are exactly like Monday Club: the reduction is a plea to get people into the pub when there clearly haven’t been enough people in the pub. Except where Monday Club just pretty directly targets a quiet day, this is a ‘please come to Brewdog please sign up for our thing so we can say how many people have signed up and used our thing recently to inspire investor confidence.’
I was really sad to read that the former landlord of the Dog and Bell in Deptford, Charles Gallagher, has passed away. He and his wife Eileen ran the pub for nearly three decades (from 1988 to 2017) and although it’s had a huge makeover and become its current success in the time since they handed it over, it was their work that formed the fabric and personality of the place.
Back when I lived in Deptford Creek (and I mean IN the creek, on a boat) there were still a fair number of shitholes you could drink in around there. Ok, yes, Buster Mantis et al had just started moving in but it wasn’t quite where it’s gone now. Also, despite being very judgey about it me and a mate once had a lovely night in Buster Mantis where a regular bought our pints with his cocktails because we’d been waiting so long and only wanted something straightforward, so don’t judge etc.
But I digress. There were shitholes. Now even the Bird’s Nest has had a makeover - we tried to avoid going in there at the time, due to living in the water (or mud, dependent on tidal state) behind it and so already well on our way to becoming local main characters. The Dog and Bell, at the time (this was about 2016) was what I’d call charmingly shabby.
It had one of the best beer selections around, including plenty of cask. The most powerful garden heat lamps you have ever experienced. A really friendly atmosphere, even when you came in wet and muddy and begged to charge your phone because you’d been draining bilge water for hours and still hadn’t got the leccy back on.
A proper pub, basically. If we’re going to go into some shit metaphor about online marketing (and I’m afraid we’re going to) then a proper pub is a platform; you make the memories and jokes and great nights there from what it is. And y’know, the moderation therefore is what it is, too. I’m sure someone wants to run X: the bar but it’s sure as fuck not me.
I was reading an interview in the MA with the guy who runs Red Engine. They do experiential bars, including Flight Club - which I went to a few months back for a corporate thing, a reason to go that I suspect motivates a lot of people through the doors. For that, it’s perfectly good fun, diverting enough that the awkwardness of a work do isn’t bearing down on you and - oh, look, let’s not pretend I’m exactly the life and soul of the party but I still managed to have a good time (I think, did fall asleep on the train and end up in Dartford so don’t take my word for it) so well done, good job.
A lot of it’s relatable stuff in the interview: summer’s a weird struggle for any indoor venue (my beer garden is still closed but… soon… please…) and it’s very hard to predict income. (Actually, sidenote but this week-by-week, also in the MA, correlates almost totally to the up-and-down at my pub, which surprised me)
But then there’s other stuff that made me look at the Red Engine website and. I say this as someone with a (brief) past working in Shoreditch-based digital agencies but: that’s a Shoreditch-based digital agency not a pub company if I ever saw one. Which made me feel deeply weird.
I get it, the experience is what’s being sold and this is all part of the shifting trends in the nighttime economy and me being squeamish about what’s actually a pub will never remove the novelty bar from being part of the same environment. As much as I might hate it, other people like having fun and I’ve got to respect that as a major reason they go out - something I’m very invested in them doing.
Which kind of brings me back to Brewdog. If you’re marketing your cut-price beer for email harvesting like it’s a paywalled B2B paper then no wonder your pubs feel like LinkedIn: IRL.
It also just annoys people. Why should I be stocking Wingman if you’re going to undercut me by selling it at £1 a pint? The fact that’s grossly irresponsible and would attract plenty of ‘the horrors of binge drinking’ articles if it was Stella or even Fosters aside, there’s no point in me trying to sell a beer at the prices I’d need to sell it to cover overheads and the cost of a keg if they’re going to devalue it and make punters complain about those costs.
There were plenty of reasons I got rid of Wingman. The first was that it was never anyone’s first, second, third or fourth choice for a session IPA and I wanted something people actually wanted - if it had been a top seller it would have been harder to justify throwing out. The rest was entirely what the company does and who its founder(s) represent. I suspect it’s a mix of all those things why 2,000 pubs have removed Brewdog beers, although ironically that’s a paywalled article I don’t want to give the Telegraph my email to get into so I may never know more.
[Later edit: thanks to Paul, who helps me with basically everything, I’ve now read the article and it’s the collapse of chain deals for Brewdog, who now basically just have Wetherspoons to rely on. Like so many of us during financial strife.]
I’ve replaced Wingman with SALT’s Alpacalypse, a collaboration with Molson Coors so not exactly a dedication to indie beer. I do still want to get Bexley Brewery’s Chatter as a true hazy IPA but sometimes you have to pick the least-worst alternative that’s easily to hand.
Alpacalypse certainly has a few wacky digital agency stylings of its own. There is probably no getting away from the goofyfication of everything and also, despite my aforementioned fun-hating tendencies, it’s probably just nice to treat having a beer like a bit of a laugh and not spending 10,000 hours relentlessly studying hops.
Because that’s what it’s all about in the end, isn’t it? Not splitting the flipping G and having the most instagrammable ‘moment’ - the pints really are incidental to the memories we make along the way, just a platform not the content.
Right now let’s go and clean an entire pub garden before we open today.
Cheers,
Hazel
*I say hopefully because that certainly isn’t how all parent companies, especially the non-brewery ones, do it. At some point I’ll write about the glorious mess made by breaking up the breweries’ monopoly in order to make a much bigger monopoly of houses tied in way more convoluted ways and how it’s straight-up killing pubs but this is long enough already.