The full scale of BrewDog’s collapse is now in numbers: BBC News reports that BrewDog creditors unpaid by the administrators face losses across a debt pile that totals more than £190m, with virtually no class of creditor emerging whole.
Administrators Clare Kennedy and Ben Browne of AlixPartners published their update on Thursday, warning of Beverage Daily‘s characterisation of the situation: “insufficient funds” to meet the debts in full. The list of those left short runs from the UK government to Lord’s Cricket Ground.
BrewDog Creditors Unpaid Across Every Class of Debt
The numbers are unambiguous. £489,000 in unpaid wages and holiday pay has already been compensated through the government’s redundancy payment scheme, but AlixPartners says there are insufficient funds to reimburse the government for that outlay. A further £2.4m in unpaid VAT owed to HM Revenue and Customs by the bars business will not be recovered, according to BBC News. A separate £3.6m owed to HMRC will be repaid.
Unsecured creditors, including Lord’s Cricket Ground, West Ham United and Manchester University, will receive less than a penny in the pound. Beverage Daily puts total unsecured claims against the bar business at more than £207m, a figure that covers a broader subset than the headline £190m creditor estimate.
Private equity investor TSG, which bought a 22% stake for £213m in 2017, has been wiped out entirely. BBC News reports the specific debt TSG will not recover is £27.6m, superseding earlier rounded estimates of “nearly £28m.” Lender HSBC is expected to recover approximately £42m of the roughly £61m it is owed.
AlixPartners has been explicit that the outcome was not a consequence of a failed auction. The firm stated that ‘no offer was made at any stage of the sales process, from any prospective bidder, which would have preserved BrewDog in its entirety,’ according to Yahoo Finance. The costs of removing unauthorised occupiers from shuttered bars, and the limited proceeds from ageing vehicles of ‘varying roadworthiness,’ compounded the shortfall.
What Tilray Bought and What It Left Behind
The rescue itself was narrower than its press coverage suggested. In March, US cannabis and drinks group Tilray Brands acquired BrewDog’s worldwide intellectual property, UK brewing operations, and eleven brewpubs including sites at Canary Wharf, Paddington, Edinburgh DogHouse and Tower Hill, for approximately £33m. According to the Tilray SEC filing, the acquired assets are expected to generate annual net revenue of approximately $200m and adjusted EBITDA of approximately $6–$8m.
Tilray also acquired BrewDog’s Australian operations separately for an undisclosed sum, picking up a production facility in Brisbane, two owned bars, and three franchised venues across Victoria, New South Wales and Western Australia. The Tilray investor-relations press release describes the combined global platform as approximately $500m in scale.
According to Yahoo Finance, citing The Telegraph, Tilray’s chief executive said BrewDog had ‘no money left’ by the time the rescue deal was agreed. The business had accumulated an £800m debt pile owed to TSG, and had previously been mooted as a candidate for a London Stock Exchange float with a potential valuation as high as £2bn.
The 38 bars excluded from the Tilray deal closed immediately. Beverage Daily reports that 484 jobs were lost when those bars shut, while 733 positions were preserved across BrewDog’s head office, brewing and bar divisions. The snippet originally cited 440 redundancies; the Beverage Daily figure of 484, drawn from reports at the time of closure, is the more specific count.
In 2024, BrewDog generated a loss of £34.1m, an improvement on the £62.7m loss the prior year, but not enough to avert administration. The 200,000 “equity punks” who crowdfunded the business have seen their investments rendered worthless.
Co-founder James Watt, who called the collapse ‘heartbroken’-inducing, has since launched a new venture, Second Best, and offered former BrewDog investors shares in it. Several recipients complained to the Information Commissioner’s Office over how their contact details were obtained. Watt denies wrongdoing. Whether Second Best escapes the pattern of its predecessor is the only BrewDog storyline left worth watching.
