Sober end to BrewDog's rewilding adventure

After just five years, the troubled brewer has sold the Scottish estate at the centre of its carbon pledges, writes Barney Macintyre

- Barney Macintyre

BrewDog has sold a 9,300-acre estate in the Scottish Cairngorms to a specialist carbon credit company after ditching plans to go “carbon negative” by planting trees on the site.

The Kinrara estate, a plot of moorland on the banks of the River Spey, was bought by BrewDog in 2020 for £8.8m, according to Land Registry records. At the time, the beer company said it would plant a “lost forest” of 3m trees on the site by 2025, partly funded by sales of “Lost Lager” beer.

But by 2023, after a summer drought, roughly half of the 500,000 trees planted by BrewDog on the hillside had died, according to responses to FOI requests made by Nick Kempe, a campaigner at Parks Watch Scotland. Soon afterwards, the brewer was scolded by the Advertising Standards Agency, which said that its claims to be carbon negative were misleading. In 2024, the company abandoned its carbon negative target and said it would stop applying to buy carbon credits.