BrewDog founders Martin Dickie and James Watt
BrewDog has unveiled its BrewDog Blueprint — a business manifesto with more than 30 initiatives that aims to evolve its beers and business, as well as how it collaborates with and supports its global community and industry over the next 12 months and beyond.
Marking a new dawn for the brewery, the Blueprint includes a wealth of plans, including new beers, new bars, and new ways of doing business, as the business enters its second decade.
The content and the project scope within the document were generated in collaboration with the brewers’ 90,000-strong community of shareholders, who contributed to the themes and focus areas via BrewDog’s Equity Punk Forum.
As part of its commitment to contributing positively the UK craft brewing scene, BrewDog will be hosting an open day at its brewery in Aberdeenshire, inviting anyone who works for a UK independent craft brewer to visit the facility, and attend seminars on subjects from sales to brewing, to export and quality.
BrewDog will cover accommodation for all those in attendance, and interested brewing industry professionals can e-mail openday@brewdog.com to indicate their interest.
The Blueprint also reveals a number of new product and distribution innovations. The first of these is The Hop Hub, its new distribution centre near Glasgow which is set to be Europe’s first fully refrigerated beer warehouse.
The launch of Hop Hub will mean BrewDog will establish Europe’s first fully chilled supply chain. This is set to launch in November.
BrewDog Foundation
The Blueprint also unveils the BrewDog Foundation, a £1 million annual fund that will be donated to charitable causes chosen by the brewery’s team and Equity Punks. This is an evolution of its Unicorn Fund that launched in 2016, and saw BrewDog share 10% of its profits among its team, which was extended to include a further 10% of profits being shared to charities.
To help smaller breweries flourish, the Blueprint also reveals that the BrewDog’s Development Fund is relaunching. It will be making up to £200,000 available each year to help small craft breweries and start-ups get established.
In addition to financial support, BrewDog will also be providing material support to brewers, such as help with sourcing ingredients and brewing materials, offering its state-of-the-art laboratory for beer analysis, and supporting them to grow sales by introducing recipients to its international sales network.
BrewDog’s first Development Fund partner is Dope & Dank, a US-based initiative on a mission to bring craft beer to a more diverse audience in the US and around the world. BrewDog will start producing some of its classic beers in cask, as well as reviving iconic recipes from the past decade as voted for by its community.
The Blueprint also includes BrewDog’s revived barrel-ageing programme, The Hinterlands, as it looks to reignite its established heritage for barrel aged stouts.
Furthermore, BrewDog announced its commitment to reducing its environmental impact by removing plastic from its packaging (reducing at least 129 tonnes of plastic from its supply chain per annum).
For the first time, BrewDog will be offering its Equity Punks the chance to set up their very own craft beer outpost, with the introduction of the BrewDog bar franchise programme. The initiative will be trialled in ten UK locations, allowing Equity Punks to establish their own BrewDog bar in their hometown.
The Blueprint also unveiled a flurry of new BrewDog bar openings including Paris, Hamburg, London’s Brixton and Canary Wharf, Manchester, Dublin, Toronto, Budapest and Brisbane.
The Blueprint builds on what has been a record year for BrewDog. In August, the brewery announced its half-year trading update, showing total revenue at £78 million, up by 55% versus the same time last year.
Revenue of the brewery’s bar division was up by 92% and its UK retail sales had grown by 83%. BrewDog’s flagship beer, Punk IPA is now the number 1 on-trade craft beer in the UK with a market growth of 9.8% and a value growth of over 28.8%.
BrewDog co-founder, James Watt, said: “This is our manifesto for the next decade of dog. A public declaration of how we are going to progress our unerring mission of making other people as passionate about great craft beer as we are.
“We are determined to show that craft beer can be a force for good in the world, and we’ll continue to build a completely new type of business, with our community firmly at the helm.
“There is nothing more important to us than our beer and our people, which includes not only our amazing team but also the global community we have built. This Blueprint showcases how we will fight tooth and nail for what we believe in, as we aim to make a meaningful impact on both the world of beer and the world of business.”
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