Even as he admires his shiny new £1.3 million bottling facility, Stewart Bowman, head brewer at Scotland’s largest independent beer maker, cannot help but describe the giant, German-made contraption as “a work of art”. The appliance of science, it seems, is not going to rob Brewdog of its artisanal roots.
Many of the processes in the company’s brewery in Ellon, near Aberdeen, are computer-controlled and expansion planned for next year will enable it to produce 15 million litres of beer a year, up from a present capacity of about nine million.
In the lab, where the balance of ingredients is controlled, Mr Bowman, resplendent in ZZ Top-style beard and a rock band T-shirt, talks over a soundtrack of heavy metal explaining why the business has spent £30,000 on a machine that measures impurities down to “parts in a billion”. The idea is to improve accuracy and consistency and to make it easier to select flavours and find the right combinations of hops.
Yet “no equipment in the world is as sensitive as the human palette”, he says, although “the computer can take out human error”. For all the automation, he insists that he is still in “full control . . . A bad brewer will still give you nothing back, even with the best tools and ingredients. But it’s important you don’t get sucked down the rabbit hole. A lot of brewing is artistic and creative and there will always be an unknown element.”
As its first employee, Mr Bowman has been one of the few constants for Brewdog since the company was founded in 2007 by James Watt and Martin Dickie, after a renowned beer writer tasted one of their home brews and told them to quit their jobs. An early brew failed when a mobile phone and car keys fell into the mix, Mr Watt recalls, and hooking a garden hose to a fermentation tank produced an ale that “tasted like plastic”.
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That “three-man-and-a-dog” operation has become one of Britain’s fastest-growing companies, thanks to a combination of aggressive and often antagonistic marketing, some highly respected craft beers and a commitment to exports.
Brewdog is predicting sales of £32 million this year, up from £18.9 million last year, with 65 per cent of sales coming from its exports to 50 markets. About 10 per cent of its output goes to its own chain of 22 bars, which includes sites in Tokyo, São Paulo and Gothenburg.
“We love the chaos of fast growth,” Mr Watt says. “If we don’t have that, we’re not pushing hard enough.”
In contrast, Mr Bowman paints a picture of a business emerging from its hectic early years into something more polished. When the company purchased a larger brewery in 2012, its bosses realised that “a lot could go wrong . . . We’ve made a number of astronomical jumps in production. Each time, you add complexity, wages, people, structure. Strategic planning is something we’ve struggled with. A lack of it has bitten us in the past, but at this size you can’t wing it any more.”
When the company started life in Fraserburgh, a fishing town north of Aberdeen, Mr Watt says that the founding principle was to take “the same attitude to the incumbents of the beer market as the punks had to pop culture”. It has made a lot of that comparison ever since, becoming synonymous with irreverent marketing. The business has had a number of run-ins with the Portman Group, the drinks industry overseer, and has courted media opprobrium by making a series of industrial-strength beers, culminating in a 55 per cent ale in 2010. Yet the company insists that it is more inter-ested in beers that are drunk for taste and enjoyment rather than volume and oblivion.
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Mr Watt acknowledges that it is time to draw a line under some of the company’s more combative tactics. “We’ve more than made our point about our disdain for industrial beers and big breweries, and there’s only so long we can play that card,” he says.
“The idea of rebellion and doing what you want underpins everything that we do, but we can’t make exactly the same point for the next 20 years and expect people to be receptive.”
If some of the company’s new-found maturity was reflected in the Scottish independence debate, Mr Watt says that he might be able to make up his mind over which way to vote. “Being a Scottish company has helped in export markets — strengthening Scottish identity and confidence can only be good for us — but I’m still on the fence because of uncertainty about things like currency and EU membership. Between now and the day, I’d like [both sides] to narrow in on a cold, hard evaluation of the facts rather than sentiment and emotion.”
Either way, he believes that Brewdog must retain its own identity as it grows. That means that it will keep experimenting with some rather more esoteric beers.
How much farther can the erstwhile home brewers go? “You’ll laugh at me, but we want to list for £1 billion in five years’ time,” he says. “We’ve got the road map with annual targets. We think it’s an achievable objective.”