James Watt once spent most of his early twenties at sea. He held a deep-sea captain's licence. At 24 he gave it up for a hut in Fraserburgh.
Born there in 1982 and raised in the fishing village of Gardenstown, he studied law and economics at the University of Edinburgh from 2000 to 2004. Then he went to sea. Sir Tom Hunter later told the Herald that Watt worked on a trawler, studied law, and then started the craft beer company with Martin in a hut.
The partner was Martin Dickie, a brewer. They were disillusioned with British beer. In April 2007 they launched BrewDog. Nobody had heard of it, and they had no marketing budget. What they had was noise.
They made beers with absurd strength, 32 per cent for Tactical Nuclear Penguin and 55 per cent for The End of History, and let the press argue about them. They avoided traditional advertising altogether. In 2011 they offered shares to the public, raising about £2 million for around 8 per cent. In 2017 TSG Consumer Partners bought 22 per cent for about £213 million. A hut had become a beer empire.
What was less visible was the cost of the noise. A prize of 'solid gold' cans turned out to be gold-plated brass, and Watt bought back 40 cans at a cost of £470,000. Then in 2021 former staff signed an open letter describing a culture of fear. A BBC Disclosure documentary followed in 2022, and BrewDog lost its B Corp certification.
Watt stepped down as CEO in May 2024, staying as Captain and Co-Founder. That year net revenue was £280 million, and adjusted earnings before tax were £7.5 million, the first profit since 2021. But decline followed. Ten UK bars closed in July 2025. The Ellon distillery shut in January 2026. In March 2026 Tilray bought the UK and Ireland operations for £33 million, with 38 bars to close and nearly 500 jobs lost.
It is hard to be fair to a story like this. The fisherman's son did what few people do: he built a global brand from nothing, in the open, on provocation. The lesson for a young founder is the other half of the same talent. Noise raises a company fast, but a team and a culture are what stay when the noise stops, and no captain can steer a ship on spectacle alone.