Last Sunday, the television personality Georgia Toffolo marked the first anniversary of her nuptials to businessman James Watt with a rhapsodic Instagram tribute. 

‘One year married to you,’ she wrote. ‘I had a whole fantasy about what marriage would look like since I was about five years old and honestly? What we have is a thousand times better. The life we’ve built is extraordinary – the highs, the lows, all of it. Me and you, my love, forever.’

Toffolo, 31, the former Made In Chelsea star better known as Toff, did not expand on the nature of those highs and lows but a great many people did not need her to clarify what might fit under the latter heading.

Less than 24 hours after that gushing marital homage on Sunday, 484 employees of BrewDog – the company Watt co-founded with his university chum Martin Dickie and led for 17 years – were told in a 15-minute conference call that they were being made redundant.

Earlier that day, tens of thousands of small investors – beer enthusiasts who had been integral to realising the self-styled ‘punk’ brewer’s dream – had received similarly gloomy tidings by email in which they were informed that BrewDog had entered administration and been sold to the US company Tilray for £33million. They are unlikely to get a penny of their investment back.

A decidedly unpunkish ending, as one former employee pointed out: ‘A company that promised to explode went out like a deflating balloon.’

Or, in more sober terms, a once £900million brand built on rebellion and the support of ordinary people quietly absorbed by a multinational buyer at a fraction of its former valuation.

Little wonder that on the professional networking site LinkedIn, where he styles himself ‘Investor – Entrepreneur – Punk’, the 43-year-old Watt adopted a humble tone in a lengthy post in which he said he was ‘heartbroken’ at the fate that had befallen his beloved company.

BrewDog co-founders Martin Dickie, left, and James Watt, right, shared a flat as students at Edinburgh

‘During my 17 years in charge there were highs, lows, successes, failures, huge gambles and many mistakes,’ he wrote, emphasising that this week had been ‘incredibly hard’.

Alas, his outpouring met with short shrift from many: While there were some who praised Watt’s vision and indefatigable energy, plenty of others were scathing.

‘Are you heartbroken you gave the institutional investor preference over the equity punks [the nickname given to the small investors]?’ one asked. ‘An arrangement that ensured we received no return on our investments?’

Another accused him of ‘continued conceit’ – while over on the social media forum Reddit, the mood was barely less febrile. ‘How can we hold these charlatans to account?’ demanded one user describing himself as ‘livid’. Another accused Watt of ‘hubris’.

Hubris seems to be a suitable word to describe the extraordinary arc of BrewDog, the small-time Scottish brewery that muscled its way into the big time.

Watt and Dickie, who had shared a flat as students at Edinburgh (Watt studied economics and law at Edinburgh University, Dickie learned brewing at nearby Heriot-Watt) were in their early 20s when they started brewing their own craft beer in an industrial unit in Fraserburgh, Aberdeenshire.

Armed with their savings and a £20,000 bank loan, they set about making aggressively hopped craft beer at a time when the British market was still dominated by mass produced lagers and traditional ales.

While Dickie, brewing degree in hand, took care of production, Watt, a former fishing boat captain, masterminded BrewDog’s outward face, orchestrating a succession of marketing stunts that ensured column inches and television coverage.

Last Sunday, the television personality Georgia Toffolo,31, marked the first anniversary of her nuptials to businessman James Watt with a rhapsodic Instagram tribute

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How BrewDog turned toxic and lost £148m… but made the ‘worst boss in the world’ a millionaire

He rode a tank through the City of London to protest at banking culture and arranged for his naked image to be projected on to the Houses of Parliament.

A helicopter was chartered to drop taxidermised cats over the capital in a stunt symbolising the extinction of financial ‘fat cats’.

The messaging was consistent: Anti-corporate, anti-establishment, proudly disruptive: ‘Rip up the rulebook’ as Watt liked to declare (and indeed, the banner slogan he has behind his LinkedIn profile picture to this day).

It worked. BrewDog surfed the crest of the craft beer revolution, expanding from a single industrial unit into an international operation with four breweries, more than 100 bars worldwide and, latterly, hotels.

Central to that meteoric rise was 2009’s ‘Equity for Punks’, effectively a crowdfunding manoeuvre which, in keeping with the business’s maverick tone, was marketed as a revolution in finance – a chance for ordinary beer drinkers to ‘own a slice of the brewery and share in its growth’.

In other words, this was not faceless capitalism; this was community ownership.

The messaging worked. Over 12 years of fundraising ’rounds’, approximately 220,000 investors bought in, contributing around £75million to the company.

Some invested little more than £50, but others put in five-figure sums. In return, they received not only shares but perks: Discounted beer, free birthday drinks and invitations to the annual AGMs –styled as Annual General Mayhem – complete with live music and tastings.

James Watt got engaged to Georgia Toffolo in 2024, shortly after he stepped away from BrewDog amid allegations of inappropriate behaviour 

Yet buried behind this glitzy facade were decisions that would later come to feature significantly when it came to this collapse.

In 2017, BrewDog sold a 23 per cent stake to the US private equity firm TSG Consumer Partners for £213million, Watt and Dickie reportedly pocketing £50million each from the deal – prompting accusations that they had ‘sold out’. Watt robustly rejected this, insisting TSG was a minority partner ‘completely about driving growth’, but TSG’s investment came with preferential rights, meaning that in the event of a sale, their capital would be repaid before other investors – a feature that has now proved crucial to the fate of its small investors.

Not that this would seem to have mattered at the time: In 2016, the year before the deal, the company had recorded a 60 per cent rise in turnover and business was booming.

‘People thought you were really cool if you worked at BrewDog,’ Charlotte Cook, a former employee, reflected this week. ‘Even though we were making beer through the night in a shed in Fraserburgh, it was amazing. BrewDog was going to take over the world.’

Behind the scenes, however, a different picture was unfolding, one that was made dramatically public when, in 2021, an open letter from a group calling itself Punks With Purpose, purportedly signed by dozens of former employees, accused the company of fostering a ‘culture of fear’.

They alleged staff were left ‘burnt out, afraid and miserable’ in the relentless pursuit of growth.

The blame was laid squarely at the door of Watt – to whom the letter was addressed.

He took to LinkedIn to respond publicly, apologising for some of his conduct (although he denied a number of the allegations). An independent review was promised. ‘I’m ultimately responsible for the culture,’ he wrote. ‘The letter that ex-colleagues wrote to us is 100 per cent my fault.’

On Monday, 484 employees of BrewDog – the company Watt co-founded with his university chum Martin Dickie and led for 17 years – were told in a 15-minute conference call that they were being made redundant

Subsequently, it emerged that Watt had engaged private investigators to gather intelligence on individuals he believed had sought to damage his reputation – a move that further dented BrewDog’s anti-establishment credentials.

Charlotte Cook, now 37, and a brewer who also writes on Substack, was one of those who signed the letter, propelled to do so after her three-year employment between 2012 and 2014 deteriorated dramatically after she was diagnosed with lupus.

‘They made it very clear that if you’re unwell you can’t work there and with only statutory sick pay, I had to keep working even though I was literally working myself to death. It was the most difficult period of my life,’ she recalls now. ‘I got nothing but grief from BrewDog for it.’

The letter undoubtedly shattered the company’s reputation, although today Cook does not believe the letter alone caused the company’s decline. Rather, she sees it as a ‘smoke signal’ – a warning that the internal strain of relentless expansion was beginning to show.

By then, Watt’s private life was also under stress. In 2020, he and his wife, illustrator Johanna Basford OBE, with whom he has two daughters, divorced after seven years of marriage.

In 2024 Watt stepped down as BrewDog’s chief executive, adopting a new title of ‘captain and co-founder’ and saying he wanted to take a ‘non-operational role’.

Operational or not, BrewDog was starting to flounder, with rising energy costs, supply chain pressures and higher alcohol duties compounding the challenge facing independent brewers across the sector.

Nonetheless, publicly, the tone remained bullish, even amid headlines in August last year showing that 2,000 outlets had stopped stocking BrewDog’s beer.

The then CEO James Taylor insisted to the Daily Mail at the time that they were ‘putting more pints into consumer’s hands than ever before’ and that the figures were misleading.

Watt is believed to have a net worth somewhere in the region of £250million but small investors have been left with nothing 

Fast forward just six months, and it was a different story. In February, BrewDog confirmed it had put itself up for sale, citing a ‘challenging economic climate’ and tax headwinds. For weeks, uncertainty hung over its workforce.

Then, on Monday – the day after Toff’s heartfelt Instagram post –employees were given 25 minutes notice of a 15-minute video meeting with Taylor.

They were not permitted to ask questions and by its conclusion, 484 of them had been informed their roles were redundant. Many were left in tears.

‘I’ve been representing bar workers for over a decade and it is the worst mass redundancy I have dealt with, including during the pandemic,’ Bryan Simpson of the Unite union told the BBC.

Meanwhile, investors had already received an email informing them of the news and suggesting they might wish to continue as ‘ambassadors for the brand’ under new ownership – a line that did not land well with those facing losses.

Among them is small business adviser Richard Fisher, 58, from Suffolk, who invested £12,000, attracted by the company’s branding. ‘Maverick, independent, to a certain extent rebellious – it was all good stuff,’ he said. Now, just a few years later, he’s writing off the sum.

While he hadn’t quite shared the expectations of those who thought BrewDog was going to be their ‘Google or Tesla’, Fisher had hoped, like any investor, for a degree of profit.

‘I genuinely thought BrewDog would go public, be listed on the stock market with the freedom to buy and sell shares and there was potential to make a bit of profit,’ he recalled.

Alongside an active social media presence, Watt has a new venture, Social Tip – a platform that pays users to post about brands

Another investor, Phil Halsey, has written off his £2,500. ‘It’s extremely disappointing that it’s gone this way,’ he said.

He hadn’t sold his shares when he had the opportunity: ‘I just hoped beyond hope that my suspicions weren’t going to be fulfilled and something good would come out of it. Probably not now.’

Others struck a more resigned tone, pointing out that all private investment carries risk and that BrewDog was no different. ‘The prospectus that I saw when I invested made it very clear that it was a risk,’ one investor wrote on Reddit, pointing out that even if it was front of the queue for a payout, TSG would itself be likely to take a substantial hit.

Not everyone is out of pocket, of course. Today, Watt is believed to have a net worth somewhere in the region of £250million.

Nor has he exactly retreated from public view.

Alongside an active social media presence, he has a new venture, Social Tip – a platform that pays users to post about brands – which he launched a month after stepping down from BrewDog in 2024. His goal, he announced at the time, was ‘becoming a unicorn’ – meaning a private company valued at over $1billion, just as BrewDog was in 2017.

Tone deaf? Perhaps not quite – though BrewDog was undoubtedly already in a decline at the time – but Watt does have a habit of not quite ‘reading the room’.

Last August, as news was circulating of BrewDog’s struggles, he gave an interview to The Sunday Times in which he revealed he had spent around £1million ‘biohacking’ his health, investing in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber at the penthouse apartment he owns overloooking the Thames – he and Toff also own a home in Aberdeenshire – neurofeedback technology (treatment that trains the brain to self-regulate its electrical activity with healthier, more efficient patterns) and a complex supplement regime.

‘I take Zoom meetings in the hyperbaric chamber. I take phone calls in the sauna and quite often I’ll do workout sessions with people that I’m going to do business things with,’ he declared.

This week, of course, the tone was more subdued.

‘The mistakes hurt far more than the successes console,’ he wrote on that LinkedIn post. They almost certainly do, for Watt was nothing if not passionate about his endeavour.

For those who lost jobs and those who watched their investments evaporate, however, the words undoubtedly ring hollow.

Not only that, but they are underpinned by irony, given that a company built on tearing up the rulebook was ultimately undone by the most conventional rules of all.