BrewDog has been sold to US consumer goods, pharmaceutical and cannabis company Tilray Brands in a cut-price £33m deal.
The transaction, which will be completed via a pre-pack administration, was announced by Tilray today (2 March), following weeks of speculation. It preserves the jobs of 733 employees working across BrewDog’s head office, brewing and bar divisions.
Under the terms of the deal, Tilray will buy BrewDog’s brands, its brewery at Ellon in Scotland and “11 strategic brewpubs” in the UK and Ireland, including its flagship site in Waterloo, London. Some 38 BrewDog bars in the UK will close with immediate effect, resulting in 484 redundancies.
Meanwhile there would be no return to any equity holders, including those that took part in BrewDog’s Equity for Punks crowdfunding scheme, joint administrators AlixPartners confirmed.
“No offer was made at any stage of the sales process, from any prospective bidder, which would have preserved BrewDog in its entirety,” the restructuring firm said in a statement.
“As one would expect over the past two weeks, we have received significant interest in the BrewDog business from prospective buyers across both the trade and investment communities,” Clare Kennedy, managing director at AlixPartners said. “In Tilray, we have secured a purchaser with a passion for craft brewing who will be an excellent custodian and sponsor of the business in the months and years ahead.
“Having done so, our priority now is to support, to the fullest extent possible, those people whose roles have been made redundant, and we would ask operators within the UK leisure sector who are in a position to assist to contact us at any time.”
Further negotiations
Separately, Tilray said it was also negotiating a deal to acquire certain BrewDog assets in the United States and Australia.
The deal for BrewDog represented “a significant opportunity for growth in the UK and previously untapped international markets”, Tilray said in a statement.
“BrewDog is one of the most iconic, mission-driven craft beer brands in the UK,” said Tilray CEO Irwin Simon. “It helped redefine modern craft beer through bold innovation, fearless creativity and an unwavering commitment to great beer.
“As we begin a new chapter for this great brand, our priority is to refocus BrewDog on the craft beer excellence that made it beloved in the first place and strategically invest to return the operations to profitable growth.
“BrewDog’s future is bright, and we are committed to ensuring the brand continues to lead and inspire the global craft beer movement.”
BrewDog was expected to generate annual revenues of circa $200m ($150m) and adjusted EBITDA of between $6-8m, Tilray said.
The deal would take Tilray’s annual revenues from beverages past $500m (£373m) and be cashflow-positive by fiscal 2027, it added.
Who are Tilray Brands?
Tilray Brands was founded in 2013 as a pureplay cannabis producer, but has diversified to become a broader fmcg supplier across the beverage, alcohol, and wellness sectors amid stalling legalisation efforts in the US.
In more recent years, the Nasdaq-listed company has established itself as the fourth-largest craft brewer in the US via a series of mergers and acquisitions.
In 2021, it merged with Canadian cannabis company Aphria, which had bought Atlanta-based brewer SweetWater for $300m just six months prior.
In 2022 it acquired New York-based Montauk Brewing Company, before adding a swathe of AB InBev-owned craft beer brands including Shock Top, Blue Point Brewing Company and 10 Barrel Brewing Company a year later.
In 2024 it purchased four Molson Coors-owned breweries (Hop Valley Brewing Company, Terrapin Beer Co, Revolver Brewing, and Atwater Brewery), also in the US.
Last month, Tilray struck a deal to produce, market, sell and distribute Carlsberg’s stable of brands in the US for a minimum of five years from next January.
Why BrewDog was sold
The deal announcement comes less than three weeks after BrewDog confirmed it had appointed restructuring firm AlixPartners to run an accelerated sales process for the Scottish beer business, following five successive years of pre-tax losses.
BrewDog, founded in 2007 by James Watt and Martin Dickie, enjoyed a remarkable rise for the first decade of its existence, culminating in the sale of a minority stake to private equity firm TSG Consumer Partners in 2017.
The deal netted Watt and Dickie a combined £100m but saw BrewDog’s shareholder structure altered, with TSG handed a higher class of share than that of the business’s 220,000 retail investors.
This meant that – in the event of a sale – TSG was guaranteed to receive a payout in advance of BrewDog’s other investors.
Since 2017, however, BrewDog has fallen on leaner times, failing to turn a profit since 2019 amid stalling revenues. In the year ended 31 December 2024, net revenues were flat at £280m, with pre-tax losses standing at £36.6m, down from £59.2m a year earlier.
Despite further investment from TSG, and a restructure announced in October last year, BrewDog’s fortunes had not improved sufficiently by the turn of the year, culminating in the appointment of AlixPartners as joint administrators on Monday.
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