MY LAST EVER PINT IN A BREWDOG

February 2026. Hull.

Just back from a lovely evening with James at the “new” Harlequin, burgers and 12% Dutch banana bread pastry stouts, and finding it hard to find the enthusiasm to complete my blogs on Hull.

Which probably sums up the whole problem with BrewDog. No-one cares any more.

Leaving Sam Smith’s Blue Bell last Sunday I thought I ought to do something completely different. And how better to follow Sir Humphrey than with Sir Dickie Watt, two legends of UK pubs.

I know they’ve just anounced the sale of BrewDog and the closure of most of the bars (sympathies to the staff), but in truth they’re being put out of their misery. I can’t remember a busy one, even in Edinburgh last year, and in their giant Hull venue, with the North London derby on 22 screens, I was the only customer.

My last memorable visit to a Brew Dog was Sheffield’s bar, just before it’s closure last year, when they had sours, imperial stouts and a mead for the tickers, all three of us at 11pm on a Friday night.

Hull last week had given up completely at any pretense to being a modern craft bar; I’d seen a better BD range at the Tesco extra.

“What’s the staff selection ?” I ask, hopefully, wishing I’d gone to the Spoons Taphouse.

I really felt for the barman.

“Sorry, we don’t have that. I recommend the Black Heart Stout, it tastes like Guinness“.

Perhaps it does, it just tasted off to me, as old and tired as the soundtrack of Pink Floyd, The Who and Rush.

And they used to make great cask beer; Edge, Alice Porter, even Punk. Where did it all go wrong ?

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Published by retiredmartin

Retired NHS, doing long walks around UK and the world to record the great bits. Focused on Good Beer Guide pubs and live music.

31 thoughts on “MY LAST EVER PINT IN A BREWDOG”

  2. The most perplexing thing about the whole Brewdog saga is that so many people happily signed up for what was effectively a Ponzi Scheme. A ‘craft’ Ponzi Scheme admittedly…

    (the real) Mark

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  3. Every Dog Has Its Day
    .
    Tim Webb used to write that “BrewDog is the most successful new UK brewery for over a century and by a massive margin”
    I now believe that Holdens is the most successful new UK brewery since early last century though by a modest margin.

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      1. Scott, Established three years after Brewdog, Steve Nuttall’s new Joules Brewery has been brewing for only sixteen years, well short of Holdens’s 111 years. A proper brewery for its local pubs though it is a better project that Steve’s previous revitalisation of the breweryless Caffreys brand.

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    2. Yes Scott but on borrowed money, and Brewdog with its “smoke and mirrors” had a bigger estate than the new Joules.
      Success for me mainly means sustainability, being able to brew for many, nor just a couple of, decades.

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  4. Last Brewdog: Union Square, Aberdeen. Two pints of undistinguished Wingman. Cards only (ugh). Left thinking it was a reasonably OK way of whiling away some time but not caring if I never went to a Brewdog again. And now I won’t. Ho hum.

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  5. They definitely set the ball rolling in UK for craft beer, and away from twiggy Boring Brown Beer so we should be grateful!

    Previously we’d been paying £3+ for imported American bottles fifteen years ago.

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  6. Suppose this is what happens when you look to become a lifestyle brand rather than a brewer of perfectly good beer. I remember going to their bars in London (Clerkenwell, Tower Hill etc.) a decade or so ago and thought they had the ‘Spoons for Yuppies’ strategy nailed. Add to that the fact that they were ubiquitous in supermarkets before Vocation, Northern Monk, Thornbridge et al started taking shelf space, and am not really sure what went wrong for them as a business. Like you, I can’t remember the last time I went past or in one that had any life to it, and that predates Covid!

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    1. It’s only 7 years ago they made an apologetic re-entry to the cask market, didn’t last long. I really rated their food, but it increasingly looked poor value compared to the Vocations and duller pub chains.

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  7. The name’s wrong, and very tired now.

    “Wye Valley”, for instance, makes you think of something beautiful.

    “Brewdog” of something noisy, irritating, and smelly.

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  8. “And they used to make great cask beer; Edge, Alice Porter, even Punk. Where did it all go wrong ?”

    That’s so true Martin. It went wrong with overweening chutzpah and believing their own rhetoric, but not to the point where they fled with the dosh before the inevitable tits up ending.

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      1. Forgot that entirely.

        The one i miss is Edge, a 2.8% cask beer from 2014 that could have revolutioned lower ABV drinking. Think that was about the time the brewer left (?) and they ditched cask.

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    1. 2010 makes perfect sense. Cask was discontinued around 2013 I think, before a brief revival in 2019. I reckon cask Punk was a great beer, as Tim Webb keeps saying on CAMRA’s forum.

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    1. Indeed. That move did them no good at all, particularly with Punk about £6.50 in their own bars and probably less fresh.

      I don’t think it’s as popular in Spoons now either.

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  11. I only ever went in the Birmingham one and never really got the concept. They seemed to be well above the asking price of the other local bars well before it was a thing.
    It seemed pretty busy when I was opposite in Cherry reds last Saturday drinking much better beer at decent prices

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  12. last Brewdog beer I had was probably at 38,000ft somewhere over the Atlantic ocean, a can of their Speedbird, which tasted like all their beers had become, just paler versions of PunkIPA, the original, not the version theyve been chucking out for a while.

    not being blessed with a local Brewdog, they tried multiple times and kept failing to seal the deal, or bothering to search one out whilst travelling around the UK, Ive not really kept up with how their bars had been faring of late. Though I dont think theyre alone in the cant work out why people arent visiting them in the numbers thing anymore, the whole pub/bar industry seems on a cliff edge now waiting for the next winter storm & a bit more of the land recedes into the sea, to leave another group teetering on the edge.

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    1. Others will have perspectives on how well trade is holding up in pubs and bars, but the evidence of my own eyes is that youngsters are turning to traditional pubs and everyone else is filling Wetherspoons every day.

      I really think Brew Dog have been an outlier for a decade. Their bars were far too quiet during the day. Punk IPA sales in the free trade and supermarkets offset losses in the bars, but we’re they ever that profitable ?

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      1. I’ve just had a look through the BrewDog accounts. They made profits in the years up to 2017. Since then it has all been losses except for 2019. The business wasn’t viable.

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