Business is black and white. Success or otherwise can be measured by one look at the bottom line. On Saturday (21 March), Propel reported BrewDog will leave its creditors out-of-pocket by almost £500m. There will not be a single penny coming back to the reported 220,000 Equity Punk investors who pumped £70m into this business over seven crowdfunding rounds. Private equity investor TSG, a more seasoned investor on the face of it, also has a lot of explaining to do to its own investors given the amount of money it has poured down the BrewDog drain – not least the £213m it invested in 2017 on the promise of a ludicrous 18% return per annum. The verdict is well and truly in – BrewDog stands as one of the most enormous capital destruction exercises in living memory. 

 

Since its inception, there can be few observers who have failed to enjoy BrewDog’s chutzpah and its marketing dynamism. Co-founder James Watt can lay claim to marketing genius indeed. Brilliant publicity stunt followed brilliant publicity stunt as Watt challenged the brewing status quo and carved out BrewDog’s position as some kind of beer renegade. The message was hugely alluring – it attracted hundreds of thousands of small investors who loved the idea they were part of some sort of Mad Max world of beer punks. 

 

The reality came home to roost in 2017 when Watt and his co-founder Martin Dickie accepted £50m each from TSG when it acquired its stake in BrewDog. The founders had cashed out. They had sold BrewDog’s future for an enormous lump sum. It didn’t really matter what happened to their company from that point because they had made their fortunes. TSG were granted a guaranteed rate of return that looked absurd then – and looks absurd now. The returns being promised looks fantastic – they were, in fact, fantastical. This was a beer company in a hugely crowded and small market – not a technology company with the prospect of global dominance. Margins in beer remain small – products can easily be swapped out for other products without anyone giving more than a small shrug. The world’s best investor, Berkshire Hathaway, led by Warren Buffet, has achieved an average return for its investors of 19.8%. This should put the TSG returns into some sort of context. 

 

At the time, Watt indicated what lay ahead. BrewDog would either become a global success or “crash and burn”, he said. TSG was a kind of Pacman that would gobble up ever larger amounts of BrewDog under its compounding rights. The only way to stay ahead of this insatiable monster would be to create nose-bleed kinds of additional value. Steady returns for its 220,000 small investors were off the table. All of this looks reckless or deeply cynical. Astonishingly, small investors were tapped twice more in crowdfunding rounds after TSG’s investment had been made. You’d have to admit that BrewDog would also be shaken by the global storms that hit everybody – not least covid and soaring energy costs. Then there were the cost increases on business by the current deeply unsympathetic government, undermining large parts of the sector. But the valuations assigned to BrewDog before this turbulence made no sense. In the end, the market value of BrewDog boiled down to £33m. And for the buyer, Tilray, this valuation only made any sense as a new entrant to the UK market. Noticeable was the absence of any of the existing large brewers in the UK. They are not short of brewing capacity, so it made no sense to buy more capacity that is located geographically, Aberdeenshire, where the distribution costs must be high. These large brewers must also have placed little value on BrewDog’s brands – they are not short of beer brands that need investment. 

 

Tilray owns 15 craft beer brands and has already indicated it will have to cull BrewDog’s 100-plus brands. This weekend, BrewDog’s administrator, AlixPartners, lifted the curtain on the pile of unpaid debts BrewDog has left behind. Meanwhile, James Watt blamed Tilray for wiping out the Equity Punks in its £33m takeover. It’s an absurd allegation, given how little respect Watt seemed to have for small investors who believed his mythology. His considerable marketing and public relations skill are being put to use, and he tries to position himself as the guardian of the small investor at BrewDog. So, for example, he reports that from 2010 until he stepped down in 2024, the business grew by 49% per year. Well, we know the company was losing large amounts of money – £148m over five years – and we know the eventual sale price. This was not profitable growth. In the US, for example, BrewDog opened a brewery and bars as it chased this illusory global success. The reality was somewhat more prosaic. It reported a loss of £6.7m in May 2025 and said that it was only operating at 30% capacity at its Columbus, Ohio, brewery, which led to a move into contract brewing to try and claw back to profitability. 

 

Anyone who shows BrewDog’s early days ambition deserves our admiration. We need entrepreneurs like Watt and Dickie to shake things up. But BrewDog’s story has soured in the last decade – and its failure is also down to Watt and Dickie. They made bad choices. Don’t let Watt tell you otherwise. 

It was during my teens and early twenties that I’d visit London with my mother for short breaks and choose smart restaurants for our lunch, which over the years took us to some of the city’s finest dining rooms, serving food from acclaimed chefs. These included The Oak Room with Marco Pierre White, The Connaught with Michel Bourdin and Nico at Ninety in Park Lane, where Nico Ladenis ruled the roost.

 

My mates in Yorkshire were puzzled by my interest in visiting such unfamiliar places with expensive, fancy food and (all too often) off-hand waiters. I’d argue the case with them that I was simply ahead of the game and giving myself more years to eat well and enjoy the “good life”. In due course, they would cotton onto the joys of dining in smart restaurants and join me.

 

Maybe they did follow me, although I wasn’t wholly convinced about this to be honest. Whatever their future actions, the appetite for fine dining in smart restaurants has certainly waned over recent years, with fewer youngsters now finding appeal in the category. During a lunch at Sartoria in Savile Row with Martin Williams, chief executive of Evolv Collection, he acknowledged the challenges to me.

 

He has recently installed a new chef in its Orrery restaurant with the aim of earning a Michelin star for the Marylebone venue – which has just reopened – but he recognises this move to offering a finer cuisine in a slick setting has the risk of reducing the pool of potential customers.

 

Rather than eating star-level food in a traditional dining room, younger customers have become more enamoured with venues and cuisines that have high social media currency. Although this can be fleeting for the venues, it is a game that more establishments are recognising they have to participate in if they are to appeal to younger generations.

 

This is clearly not the only route to enticing the future customer grouping into smart restaurants, of course, as Williams mulled over the potential for the industry to offer discounts to younger people, which would mirror the lower cost memberships that many private members’ clubs offer. It ensures they have one eye on the future and do not suffer from dwindling memberships as their numbers inevitably die off.

 

The higher end of the restaurant sector can learn much from the horse racing industry, which had for years suffered from an increasingly ageing customer base, fuelled by a dearth of youngsters attending meetings. Industry-wide efforts have completely turned around the situation.

 

Many racecourses have “festival-ised” the day for key meetings by adding live music – with some major bands booked – and DJs, along with food villages and pop-up restaurants on-course. They have also themed certain days and leant into the fashion side of racing, with dressing up now a big part of the experience. This has all helped fuel social media activity, and the courses themselves have promoted their activities down these channels.

 

Student days and group discounts have become commonplace at many courses, which has helped fuel the pipeline of first timers to race meetings. My undergraduate daughter and a friend recently went to a midweek evening meeting at Chelmsford Racecourse on free tickets and very much enjoyed the cost-efficient night out.

 

Highlighting the proactive mindset now in place in the horse racing category is the initiative between the British Horseracing Authority and Flutter UKI that involves a Dragon’s Den-style summit, which is seeking to unearth new solutions to attract more next generation racegoers. They are open to concepts including augmented reality race guides, wearable technology for horses and immersive virtual reality experiences. 

 

Is all this effort working? Well, annual racecourse attendance figures in Britain topped five million for the first time since 2019, with a 3.6% increase over the previous year, and youngsters and families represented the highest rising group. The number of under-18s increased by 17% from 2024, according to the Racecourse Association.

 

Back in the finer dining category, there is certainly some progressive activity being seen on the margins as some leading chefs are mixing things up a bit and injecting more experiential elements that have greater appeal to the younger crowd. Jason Atherton’s Row on 5 splits its tasting menu into three parts, which are each taken in three very different styled rooms across different floors of the venue in Savile Row, where an eclectic mix of music is played.

 

Also removing the old-school nature of fine dining and amping up the soundtrack is Gareth Ward at Ynyshir, who employs an in-house DJ to play a varied mix of vinyl that very much sets the vibe level to youthful. Recently opened Materia from Victor Garvey has also taken this route, with a DJ playing a varied mix of beats, and the scene being set when guests initially enter the restaurant through a passage that houses key ingredients on the menu, which can be touched and smelt. 

 

And Michael O’Hare has constantly sought to bring theatre into his high-end dining rooms in the north. There is also more playfulness being brought to menus at spin-off restaurants from leading Michelin chefs. Consider the myriad potato options at Clare Smyth’s Corenucopia, and the clever creations at Trillium in Birmingham from Glyn Purnell. 

 

These are chefs very much at the top of their game and they have recognised the need to inject more of an experience into the fine dining category. It’s not about revolution but a gradual evolution of the model that ensures it still appeals to the existing customer base, but also, critically, tempts in those younger guests.

There’s an old BBC TV documentary doing the social media rounds; a 1973 episode of Man Alive titled “The Death of the Local Pub?” It would be a chilling title if we weren’t so used to the idea.

 

I’m intrigued by the way the pub, for at least the past 100 years, has been repeatedly plunged into a state of crisis. It’s not mere nostalgia that I find these historical moments fascinating. It’s what they might tell us about pubs, and the way we see them, today.

 

In 2026, the blame for the predicament pubs find themselves in falls mainly on the government. Half a century and more ago, it was the big brewers and, in Man Alive’s case, entrepreneurs such as Bob Wheatley.

 

Wheatley was a well-known, if shadowy, figure where I grew up in east London. One of his pubs was The Heathcote, on the corner of our road. It was part of a deal he’d struck with Charrington’s, which had merged with Bass a few years earlier, making it a national firm. 

 

Robert Humphries, later to found the All Party Parliamentary Beer Group, had joined Charrington’s as an area manager in London in 1973 and remembers that the brewer saw partnerships like this as a way of introducing skills it didn’t possess – the skills needed to run the slightly edgy Wheatley Taverns with its exotic go-go dancers, “psychedelic lights” and door supervisors trained in karate.

 

In return, multiple tenants like Wheatley took a share of the profits, a radical variation on the traditional agreement, reflecting their special value to a company struggling to yank itself into the sexy 1970s youth scene.

 

Man Alive reporter John Pitman follows Wheatley to the Heathcote, where he auditions a new dancer. She flings off her coat to reveal almost everything and proceeds to gyrate frantically to heavy rock music. So, you see, not quite in the comfort zone of an old-school brewery.

 

But the tightly coiffured Wheatley, in his penny-collared shirt, was not going to kill off the local by himself. These places could only work in very large premises. So, Pitman picks up another thread in his story.

 

Between 1970 and 1973, another major brewer, Watney’s, had converted hundreds of its tenanted pubs to direct management. The scandal, which also occupies a whole chapter in Christopher Hutt’s book of the same year, “The Death of the English Pub”, was that these were successful businesses. 

 

The tenants didn’t want to go. They accused the brewery of wanting all the profits for itself, and they probably had a point, though we have seen these industry swings from tenanted to managed and back again several times since. And the regulars are convinced their pub will never be the same again; that the cold, dead hand of the brewery accountant cannot replace the warm personality of the tenant.

 

Finally, the documentary takes us to Norfolk, and the village of Stiffkey, which once had three pubs but now has none. The old boys speak movingly of what they have lost, all the things the pub brought to their lives. The former licensee of The Sun, still living in the shell of the pub, opens her sitting room to ex-customers so they can come and sit in the spot they used to sit and remember happy times. 

 

So, 1973 was a moment; a moment when a crisis in pubs triggers a reappraisal of their social worth; a sense we are losing something we should have better appreciated. A moment like now.

 

I wondered what had happened to the pubs featured in the show. I was in The Heathcote last year. It’s part of the Electric Star group now, still a great barn of a place populated by youngsters when I called but the smaller ankle-biting sort, milling about an obstacle course of prams.

 

The nearby Lion & Key, from which regulars fled across the road to the Grove House working men’s club when Wheatley did a job on it, is now a 55-room hotel and café bar partnered with the mighty Leyton Orient FC. The club is gone.

 

Two of the Watney’s pubs featured are trading – one as a Fuller’s managed house, one as a Marston’s franchise-style tenancy. The third closed in 2006.

 

And Stiffkey? Astonishingly, the villagers have got a pub back. The 17th century Red Lion, closed by Watney’s when it took over Bullard’s Brewery in 1963 and then a private house, reopened as a pub in 1990 and looks in good shape.

 

The answer to Man Alive’s question, then, was no, this was not the death of the local pub. And nor is it now. Yes, it’s tough out there for many, but we need pubs, and there are times when, suddenly, we understand that.

At almost every hospitality event I attend, someone asks me a version of the same question: “Is artificial intelligence (AI) actually going to help my team, or is it just another thing I need to manage?” It’s a fair question. Right now, the way most people encounter AI is through chatbots, like ChatGPT or Gemini. You type something in, you get an answer back and it feels useful but also disconnected from the reality of running a hospitality venue. 

 

The real value of AI becomes obvious when you look at how it can respond to real-world operational shocks, such as the potential London Tube strikes. An operator we work with saw sales fall by 40% during equivalent strike weeks last year, and this time, instead of guessing, it is using agentic AI to plan ahead. 

 

Within minutes, the system identified two clear opportunities. Firstly, it recommended shift reorganisations, moving team members between nearby sites and flagging where annual leave or shift cancellations would have the lowest impact. Secondly, it generated hyper-local prospect lists so teams could go to nearby businesses with targeted offers.

 

When the most recent strike was called off at short notice, agentic AI could help to recalibrate staffing and demand forecasts, preventing bloated rotas or empty venues. That’s the difference between AI as a chatbot and AI as an operational partner, and the gap between perception and reality is where the interesting conversation starts.

 

When people think of AI as “the chatbot”, they’re looking at one very visible, consumer-facing application. But that misses the vast majority of what’s happening underneath. What modern AI does well is take large, messy sets of data and find patterns that humans don’t have time to look for.

 

In hospitality, that means connecting information that currently sits in separate systems: labour data, sales figures, bookings, reviews, local event listings. Individually, a good operator can make sense of most of these – but the combination, at speed, across multiple sites, is where AI starts to do something genuinely different.

 

Most analytics tools are good at telling you what happened, and some, what’s likely to happen. But Agentic AI closes the gap between insight and action.

 

Imagine an AI layer that sits above all your operational systems. It knows who’s asking, what they’re responsible for and what decisions they need to make today. Rather than presenting a dashboard and hoping someone draws the right conclusion, it surfaces specific recommendations: “You’re likely understaffed for Thursday evening based on a local event; here are three options to fix it.” And if the manager agrees, it can act on that with a single tap. 

 

It also becomes a coaching tool. If recommendations aren’t being actioned, a line manager can see that. Not for surveillance, but in the same way a good regional manager would notice if a site consistently ignored advice. The difference is that the information is specific, timely and based on data rather than gut feel.

 

Traditional demand forecasting in hospitality relies heavily on historical data: last year’s numbers, adjusted for trends and seasonality. It works well for predictable weeks, but it misses the one-off events that drive the biggest swings in demand.

 

We can now feed AI models with regional media data, local events and even weather patterns – and the system identifies things likely to affect a specific site’s demand. It then factors that into the forecast automatically. This is not about replacing the judgement of good operators. You still need managers who know their business inside out, but it gives them better information to work with.

 

In recent research we did with Peach 20/20, 78% of operators cited a lack of confidence in their in-house technical capabilities, and 61% had concerns about cost – those aren’t trivial barriers.

 

My honest take is that technology is further ahead than most operators’ readiness to adopt it. That’s not a criticism, but a reflection of how quickly this space moves. A year ago, much of what I’ve described above was theoretical. Now it’s live and producing results.

 

One quick service restaurant business we work with saw a 1% labour saving within just six weeks of going live, through more accurate forecasting and workforce planning. A percentage point might sound modest, but at scale, it’s significant. What I find most compelling isn’t the cost saving; it’s what happened to the general managers’ time. They spend less of their day in front of a laptop and more time on the floor with teams and customers. That’s the whole point.

 

I understand the hesitation. Every new technology wave comes with promises, and hospitality has been burned before. But operators don’t have to solve everything at once. Start by centralising your data and get your labour, sales and scheduling information into systems that can talk to each other. That’s the foundation everything else builds on, and it has value even before any AI sits on top of it.

 

Some of this might sound idealistic, but so did many of things that are now unremarkable. In parts of San Francisco, people commute in self-driving cars. In areas of Ireland, Deliveroo delivers meals by drone. The pace of change is accelerating, and operators who start investigating now will be the ones best positioned to benefit.

 

AI isn’t here to replace the human connection that makes hospitality what it is. But by removing the administrative friction that quietly consumes managers’ time, it can free people up to what they signed up for: looking after guests and their teams.

 

And that, to me, is a much more interesting conversation than “will a chatbot take my job?”