Brew dog - Believe the hype?

Seemingly the biggest thing in the beer (and even normal) press has been the Scottish brewery Brew dog. Run by two young go-getters, James Watt and Martin Dickie, they have recently got investment from US-based Keith Greggor and Tony Foglio who grew Skyy vodka and sold it to Campari.

Their first recent melee with the media was when they released Tokyo, a Stout at 18.2% for £9.99 a bottle! Certainly a bold move and the hand-wringing Mail-ites were out in force complaining about this blatant disregard for the health of the nation. An MSP even launched a motion in the Scottish Parliament against Tokyo. The lack of logic and sheer bloody-minded stupidity of the MSP doing that must be deliberate. Certainly in pound per unit of alcohol it is not a cheap drink, and with plenty of New World wine around the 15% mark (and sold in 250ml glasses across the country) it's not a particularly strong drink. Perhaps they imagine teenagers downing pints of it in parks (at £17.20 a pint retail incidentally). In response Brewdog amusingly brought out Nanny State, a weak beer with the slogan "Would you like some cotton wool with that". Nice!

Most recently they are doing an online IPO to try and raise £2,300,000 from 10,000 shares (at a total of 9% of the company). I'm not a financial advisor and probably won't be buying (it values their company at over £25,000,000 with a 2008 turnover of £789,000) but it's an interesting idea. It also gives you a 20% discount on their beers for life (bought from them presumably).

In my local Sainsburys they were selling 3 of their beers for £1 each, which seemed like a great deal. In fact I wish I'd bought a few more. Anyway I will be tasting each over the next few nights, here's my first review of Chaos Theory.