Who broke Britain? Welcome to The i Paper’s opinion series in which experts and writers debate the issues that concern them about modern Britain. • Martin Lewis: the money-saving expert… who accidentally cost Britons billions• The American woman who ripped the heart out of Cadbury• The romcom king who made Britain fall in love with its own decline

Who broke Britain? Welcome to The i Paper’s opinion series in which experts and writers debate the issues that concern them about modern Britain.

• Martin Lewis: the money-saving expert… who accidentally cost Britons billions• The American woman who ripped the heart out of Cadbury• The romcom king who made Britain fall in love with its own decline

Among Britain’s beer drinkers and makers I have spoken to, one name has become synonymous with bad blood, bad practices and bad legacy. That name is James Watt, co-founder of BrewDog.

BrewDog was established in 2007 by a pair of childhood friends from Fraserburgh in north-east Scotland, James Watt and Martin Dickie. They brewed their first beers with improvised kit in Dickie’s mother’s garage. From there, they built a beer brand that sought to stand against the overly corporate, bland, big money beer companies that filled the taps of Britain’s pubs.

Their company image was anarchic and anti-establishment – a middle finger to boring brews. They built their own bars, too, popularising the industrial, exposed-brick look that spawned a thousand imitators and that I would argue were markedly less inviting places to drink than regular pubs were, but that drew crowds in the 2010s for seeming new and therefore cool. Cooler-seeming still was that in 2009, with their company on the rise, Watt and his co-founder launched “Equity for Punks”, whereby fans of their beer could invest in the company in return for shares, and discounts on their........

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