Anarchy in the IPA Has ailing 'punk' brewer BrewDog finally had its day?

Here comes a time in every punk's life when they are no longer the snarling face of the avant-garde.

- Rob Davies

In the British beer community, opinion is divided about exactly when that sobering moment arrived for BrewDog, the self-styled "punk" brewery founded in Scotland in 2007 whose once-fizzing sales are turning flat.

Some point to the 2021 open letter by Punks with Purpose, a group of BrewDog staff who claimed to have endured a toxic "culture of fear," engendered by the company's bombastic and showmanlike founder James Watt.

"For those who had given them the benefit of the doubt, that was the moment when people thought that they don't deserve to be held up as a paragon of independent beer," according to Matt Curtis, the founding editor of the drinks magazine Pellicle.

Others go back further, to when the investment group TSG Consumer Partners paid £213m for a 22.3% stake in 2017. To the chagrin of some, BrewDog continued soliciting investment from the crowdfunders who had fueled its initial growth, even after taking the private equity money.

For the beer and food writer Melissa Cole: "That was a tipping point. After a private equity company has invested, can you still go back to the well of your fans?"

Watt's personal and professional antics since stepping down as chief executive last year, broadcast relentlessly on social media, seem to have completed the migration into the establishment.

"I compare the history of post-punk music with craft beer," said Pete Brown, a writer on drinking cultures.

"I've got a slide with [the former Sex Pistols frontman] John Lydon doing the Country Life butter commercial next to a picture of James Watt attending Nigel Farage's birthday party.

"It's like the French Revolution... inevitably the revolutionaries become the reactionaries."

Views may differ about when the brewer lost its countercultural credentials, but there is little dissent among beer connoisseurs about this: we have reached - and probably passed - peak BrewDog.