BrewDog Aberdeen Annual General Mayhem bash falls victim to costs

22/02/2023
Last year's Brewdog AGM was held in Aberdeen

BREWDOG’S much-anticipated Annual General Mayhem bash in Aberdeen has fallen victim to rising costs – with the craft brewer announcing plans to move the event to its bars.

The annual mass gathering draws visitors from around the world to Aberdeen, but in an update to shareholders, the Ellon-headquartered firm said the event would be held across its own venues in 2023.

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The firm’s CEO, James Watt, revealed that the event loses the business £1million and that proceeding at a time when the hospitality industry is under such huge financial pressure would be “imprudent”.

A message to investors, known as Equity Punks, by e-mail read: “In 2023, our AGM will be held on April 22, in all of our bars.

“We want to use our amazing network of bars as global hubs to being our community together on what is always our most important day of the year.

It continued: “The Aberdeen AGMs are always very expensive to host, events are not our core business and more often than not we have to pull in agency staff.

“This then means we often end up delivering suboptimal experiences to our community.

“Our 2023 experiment will hopefully ensure amazing experiences, delivered by our own team in our own world-class venues as we bring our community together all around the globe.

“From Berlin to Aberdeen and from London to Columbus.”

BrewDog co-founder James Watt argued the new plans would help support their bars.

He said: “I think it is important, that as shareholders, you take note of this point: In a year when all UK hospitality businesses are fighting hard to avoid closures and protect jobs due to an unprecedented inflationary environment to lose £1million on an event when we could do something which helped support our bars would have been imprudent.”

Last month, Mr Watt, who co-founded the brewer and chain of pubs with Martin Dickie, said that if businesses were to increase their prices in line with skyrocketing energy costs, a pint would become unaffordable.

Writing on LinkedIn, he warned that if steps aren’t taken to help businesses with running costs, we can expect ‘utter disaster for the tens of thousands of businesses in the UK’. 

His post said: ‘Would you like to pay £27.50 for a pint of Punk IPA? Nope, I didn’t think so. But that’s how much you’d be paying in BrewDog York, for example, if we’d put up prices in line with our soaring energy bills. Or how about £48.75 for a burger and fries?’

He continued, adding that businesses across the UK are facing “the crippling combination of the worst cost inflation for decades and squeezed consumer spending power”.

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