….Oh, the irony.

Hey guys,

You may have heard about a pub in Birmingham being told by our lawyers that they couldn’t call themselves Lone Wolf because we’d just launched a vodka with the same name. Well, it was all the lawyers’ fault, we had nothing to do with it. Because we’re punks. We love sticking it to the man, and we’d never do anything like that.

It is true, we didn’t stop those naughty lawyers until after the bar had to spend thousands to change their name. In fact, we didn’t so much as lift a finger until it blew up in the media over the last 24 hours. But forget about all that. We’re “punk”. And forget about the fact we have a team of lawyers. Who wear suits and everything. Forget that, we’re “anti-corporate”. We’re punk, I tell you, punk…PUNK!

Okay, wait…..

I’ve had enough. I’m exhausted. Do you have any idea how hard it is to pretend to be an edgy outsider battling the big guys when you have a huge brewery in Aberdeen and have started building another in the United States? When you export thousands upon thousands of cans of beer around the world? When you own or licence 44 bars across three countries?

Well, I’ll tell you. It’s bloody exhausting. Punks? As if.  In fact, I’m surprised that we’ve been able to carry on this charade for so long. But not as surprised as I am that so many of you fell for it. What, did you think we were a bunch of unemployed rebels brewing all our beer in squats or something? We kept banging on about being anti-corporate, even though we’re now worth more than £300 million and make £100 million a year now. And you kept falling for our punk schtick. It was all so easy, I thought it could go on forever.

But it can’t. When we started that punk shit at the beginning, it really served a purpose, but then we started making lots of money and we realised we still had to pretend to be punk so you would continue to buy our beer in ever-larger quantities.

And so we kept doing stupid fakey stunts like stuffing beer into squirrels or making a beer for Vladimir Putin to keep looking hip and cool. And it worked – it even worked when we asked you to give us money to broaden our business empire while giving you pretty much fuck-all in return. I thought calling it Equity for Punks was a step too far. I thought you’d catch on then – when has equity ever been punk? – but you didn’t. You threw money at us. Which is why we keep doing it. I reckon I could get you to pay for my grocery bill if we called it “Shopping for Punks”.

Look, we’re just two rich guys who like to piss about and do stupid things. You know those rich people who like to fly halfway across the country just to play a game of golf? That’s us – just maybe without the golf.

We’re not punks. We’re businessmen, okay. Man, it actually feels good to say that. Now we can carry on like businessmen without having to hide it all behind some empty “punk” facade.

Sorry,

BrewDog