Independent brewer Innis & Gunn has been acquired by Tennent’s owner C&C Group in a pre-pack administration deal for £4.5m. It follows the collapse and rescue deal at BrewDog in what has been a terrible week for Scottish craft beer.
Like BrewDog, thousands of crowdfunding investors who backed Innis & Gunn with millions of pounds will lose out in the wake of the pre-pack deal.
The deal does not include the three Innis & Gunn taprooms in Edinburgh and Glasgow, or the Perth brewery, with C&C already brewing a significant amount of the brand’s beers at its own Wellpark Brewery in Glasgow following a 2021 distribution agreement.
C&C has held a small stake in Innis & Gunn since signing up to the partnership.
The London-listed group acquired the Innis & Gunn brand and associated global IP from administrators at FTI Consulting today (6 March 2026) for £4.5m. FTI made 100 staff redundant immediately following completion of the pre-pack deal, with a small number of staff retained to support the closure of the brewery business and taprooms.
C&C said the acquisition represented an attractive opportunity for the group to further broaden its branded portfolio with a premium, well-established brand.
“The integration of Innis & Gunn into the group is expected to present a very low execution risk, with the brand being fully absorbed into the group’s existing operational, commercial and supply chain infrastructure,” a statement said.
The C&C board expected a rapid operational transition and minimal disruption to the business.
“We have worked with Innis & Gunn for many years and whilst it’s under difficult circumstances, we are delighted to bring the brand fully into our portfolio,” said C&C Group CEO Roger White.
“This is a compelling and highly synergistic opportunity to save a well-loved brand for which we currently brew most of the product. Our existing brewing and route-to-market platform allows us to integrate the brand effectively and quickly, supporting the ongoing supply of products to customers and consumers. We expect this acquisition to make a small positive contribution to our overall financial performance in FY27.”
C&C added it intended to develop the Innis & Gunn brand using its own production capability, routes to market and infrastructure, “leveraging existing capabilities to unlock brand value with minimal requirement for incremental overhead or capital investment”.
Dougal Sharp, Innis & Gunn founder and master brewer, said: “Today is a very difficult day, first and foremost for the brilliant people who have worked so hard to build Innis & Gunn over the past 23 years. I’m immensely proud of everything our team achieved together, creating a distinctive Scottish beer brand enjoyed by customers at home and around the world.
“I’m deeply sorry to everyone affected – particularly my colleagues who have lost their jobs and the shareholders who believed in what we were building. It’s been a bruising process for everyone.
“While this outcome is not what any of us hoped for, I’m glad the brand has found a home with C&C Group. We’ve worked closely with the team for many years and they have the scale, distribution and experience to take Innis & Gunn forward.
“Despite today’s news, I remain incredibly proud of the brand, the beer and the community that grew around it. I truly hope the next chapter allows Innis & Gunn to fulfil the potential we always believed it had.”
Administrators at FTI said Innis & Gunn, like many across the sector, had faced a number of challenges in recent months. The firmed noted a combination of factors, including a decline in consumer spending and rising cost pressures, had resulted in significant margin and liquidity pressure, which meant the business could no longer continue to trade.
Innis & Gunn history
Sharp launched Innis & Gunn in 2003 and scaled the business to become one of the UK’s most successful in the craft beer movement, thanks to his innovations with oak cask maturation.
It supplies supermarkets across the UK with its range of bottles and cans, as well as the on-trade and from its own taprooms in Edinburgh and Glasgow.
Like BrewDog, Innis & Gunn turned to the crowd to fund its growth. It launched a ‘beer bond’ in 2015 to raise £3m to buy a new brewery in Perth, with investors being paid interest in beer. The company then raised £2.4m from 1,914 backers on the Crowdcube platform in 2016 to accelerate its growth in the UK and overseas.
Innis & Gunn secured a further £3.3m at a valuation of almost £150m from 2,641 investors on Seedrs in February 2020 to help with plans to build a new, large-scale brewery in Edinburgh – with work yet to start on the project and not likely to be progressed under C&C ownership.
And like BrewDog, the business sold a stake to a US private equity firm in 2017, with L Catterton investing £15m for a 28% shareholding.
It also sold an 8% stake to Tennent’s owner C&C Group as part of a sales and distribution partnership in 2021.
However, despite many years of rapid sales and volume growth – with Innis & Gunn becoming the number one craft lager in Scotland and number two in the UK off-trade – the company has been mostly loss-making, with its last profit coming in 2016.
Revenues went into reverse in the year to 31 March, falling 2.3% to £23.6m as the Scottish on-trade market contracted and its off-trade business north of the border was hit by the 30% hike in minimum unit pricing (MUP) regulations.
The assets of fellow Scottish brewer BrewDog were sold off to US pharmaceutical company Tilray Brands in a pre-pack deal for just £33m earlier this week. It resulted in almost 500 redundancies as the majority of its UK loss-making bars closed with immediate effect.
This article was updated at 4pm on 6 March as the story developed to confirm FTI was appointed as administrator and 100 staff were made redundant.
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