I still remember my first pint of Punk IPA.
Being drawn to the electric blue badge of light glowing phosphorescent amid the other meeker brews — and then the gobful of American hops jostling for attention in the fizz of the branded glass. It was so off the charts for my early 2010s palate, it verged on the comical — or at least, the comically delicious.
BrewDog Shoreditch became a semi-frequent haunt. There weren't many Fuller's pubs where you could slurp a 16.5% jasmine and cranberry infused Japanese barley wine, your fingers Trumpian orange from Buffalo chicken wings. The beers of these renegade Scottish brewers, who'd had the audacity to invade the English capital, had nuts names like Tactical Nuclear Penguin and Sink the Bismarck! (their exclamation mark). BrewDog were in an arms race to produce the strongest beer known to man (they got it up to 55% and poured it from dead squirrels). It really felt punk. I was even tempted to sink some money into their Equity for Punk investment scheme — everything was just so bloody thrilling.
The announcement on 2 March 2026 that BrewDog is shutting nine of its London pubs with immediate effect (Soho, Camden Road, Chancery Lane, Clerkenwell, Ealing, Hammersmith, Seething Lane, Tower Bridge, Wandsworth), amid a massive nationwide wind-down, conjures mixed feelings. The closure of any bar is never happy news. It must be awful for the staff who work in a troubled industry. Equity for Punk investors won't get any of their money back. But this also feels like the natural end to a chapter of beer in London, and I'm not the only person who thinks so. "Been predicting basically this for well over a decade," said beer writer Melissa Cole.
In the 15 years since BrewDog opened its first London outpost, in Camden, the city's beer scene has frothed into a medley of breweries, taprooms and craft beer pubs from Croydon to Finchley; Twickenham to Stratford. They're making and/or serving highly competent, tasty — often exciting and unpredictable — beer. Many are one-off indies too; in an increasingly homogenous world, that's an attractive thing.
BrewDog was always about jumping the shark, but perhaps it is when it opened its Waterloo enormo-pub in 2022 — complete with an ice cream van and a slide — that brew lovers started to worry the beer was no longer top of the agenda. By now, there were BrewDogs scattered around London and the rest of the UK; they'd become as predictably identikit as Nando's. The only thing that felt maverick was the increasingly enormo-prices.
Something else happened in 2022: the BBC released the documentary, The Truth about BrewDog, which unearthed a number of unnerving claims about the company: from spurious advertising to alleged iffy conduct by co-founder James Watt. I can't say I've drunk in many BrewDog pubs since I saw that programme.
No doubt, the nine London pubs that have gone will be mourned by some, but what will really be missed — by me at least — are those halcyon days when BrewDog felt like a genuine punk brand, rather than the pubby version of Jonny Rotten flogging Country Life butter that it became.
Anyway, a handful of BrewDogs remain open for business in London — in case you do fancy a Punk IPA. Or just want to go down the slide.
