BrewDog seeks to protect itself from "bland industrial beer" takeover

In a blog post the company lamented commercial deals that had taken place in the brewing world in the past year and prophesised that AB InBev would be aiming to cut costs at its newly acquired Camden Town Brewery.

"Bad year for craft beer"

Listing off Goose Island, Camden Town Brewer, Meantime, Elysian, Lagunitas, Ballast Point, Nøgne Ø and Golden Road, founders James Watt and Martin Dickie said: “2015 has been a bad year for craft beer”.

“Global beer mega corporations, the ones who destroyed, bastardised and commoditised beer over the last 50 years have been acquiring craft breweries left right and centre,” the post stated.

“Let’s be honest, the intentions of these big companies are completely clear: they cut costs, they cut people, they cut corners and they take pride in doing so.

“Their God is market share and their stock market valuations; they act accordingly.”

"Powerless"

Although Camden Town founder Jasper Cuppaidge claimed nothing would change, “the reality is that he is now an employee of AB-Inbev and completely powerless to stop any changes the parent company want to make”, the post said.

“The first thing that will change at Camden is their cost of goods. Just by being owned by AB-Inbev the beer duty Camden will pay on a 50L keg of Hells will instantly increase by around £20.

“On their current production numbers (quoted at 65,000 HL this year) the difference between full duty and half beer duty is approximately an extra £2.7m of beer duty annually.

“To put this into perspective, in their last financial year they Camden made £319k of profit. So all of a sudden Camden have much, much higher beer duty costs and they also need to generate significantly more profit to give AB-Inbev a return. So something will have to give. No prizes for guessing what it will be.”

Independence

The post said BrewDog would be calling a meeting of its Equity Punk investors to propose an amendment to our articles of association and “entrench our independence”. Article 37.5 would be amended to read:

“The Board will exercise its discretion granted in Article 37.1 to refuse to register any transfer of any Certificated Share to a transferee who is a monolithic purveyor of bland industrial beer.”

“We are going to nail our colours to the mother fucking mast,” the post stated.

“We are going to live and die by what we believe in and the values we hold true. We are not doing this for money, we are doing this because we love craft beer.

“We are BrewDog. We are independent. We are in this for the beer. And we are here to stay.”