And so it goes on. It’s thirsty work. Thank goodness, then, that the new standard-bearers for artistic subversion also make beer. For Brewdog, Scotland’s largest independent brewery, has, it seems, taken up the battle cry. Founders James Watt and Martin Dickie may not put it explicitly in those terms, but let’s look at the evidence. First, take their opposition to what they see as the beer establishment – vocal, angry and every bit as provocative as, for example, half a cow steeped in formaldehyde.

‘A beacon of non-conformity in an increasingly monotone corporate desert,’ is how they describe themselves on their website, and ‘proud to be an intrepid David in a desperate ocean of insipid Goliaths’. It’s not only the big beer producers who come within their line of fire, either. The beer-drinking masses are also berated. ‘This is not a lowest common denominator beer … We don’t care if you don’t like it … Just go back to drinking your mass marketed, bland, cheaply made, watered down lager and close the door behind you,’ reads the label of their Punk IPA flagship beer. Yikes.

Then there are the names and descriptions of their beers (‘Punk IPA’, ‘postmodern IPA’, ‘iconoclastic amber ale’) not to mention a healthy dose of ironic social and cultural commentary — witness the ‘Royal Virility Performance’, infused with herbal viagra, brewed to celebrate the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton. The brewery even produces an ‘Abstract’ series of beers in one-off batches, ideal for collectors, and deliberately left nameless, save for the series number — 01, 02, 03 and so on. Ironic, controversial, aggressive, absurd. This is not how beer is usually marketed.

“I’ve been to a few CAMRA beer festivals and I wanted to shoot myself in the head after ten minutes”

But then Brewdog would say they aren’t ‘your usual’. Watt and Dickie want to change the way you think about beer. What you understand beer to be, what you think it tastes like, how it should be drunk — and even how it is packaged. ‘The End of History’ (featured at the bottom of this page), arguably Brewdog’s most infamous creation, released in July 2010, was 55% ABV and served up inside the carcass of a stuffed animal. The charity Alcohol Focus Scotland slated the beer as “another example of this company pushing the boundaries of acceptability in the pursuit of cheap marketing tactics”.

The animal welfare group Advocates For Animals (now known as Onekind) was even less impressed, dismissing the work as “perverse” and “a stupid marketing gimmick”. We can only guess what they thought when Brewdog put a dead deer’s head in their bars and pumped beer through its mouth. But for these enfants terribles of British beer, it’s all about making a statement.

“The logical conclusion of challenging perceptions, is to make something that’s so extreme, it completely challenges notions of how you drink beer, how you package beer, how you enjoy it. The whole thing about the packaging [of The End of History] — obviously it was controversial, but we almost saw it as a meta commentary on the state of the UK beer industry, a statement of discontent and disillusionment with how the industry is.”

That’s how James Watt, Brewdog Managing Director (or ‘Head of Stuff’, as he likes to be known) explained Brewdog’s first foray into taxidermy when we met to chat at Brewdog’s Fraserburgh brewery. Unless you do something that’s outrageous, you’re not going to be heard at all, he told us. And Brewdog has certainly mastered the art of noise. Stuffed animals and super strong beers are just one way they’ve found to manoeuvre themselves into print.

Another is to embark on a course of continual confrontation with as many organisations as possible. Most notoriously, Brewdog clashed with the industry’s self-regulatory Portman Group over the strength of its 18.2% imperial stout ‘Tokyo’. The beer was banned by the group — only for it to transpire that the original complaint had been put in by Watt himself under an alias. But Brewdog also likes to take a pop at competitors too.

The brewery has built its brand on aggressive attacks on mainstream lager brands — “faceless, generic, monolithic, multinational, industrial corporations who make such god-damn pathetic, bland, tasteless, insipid, fizzy, yellow, liquid cardboard that masquerades as beer” — and gleefully posts videos on their blog of tenpin bowling with bottles of Stella Artois, or rifle practice with bottles of Budweiser.

Small, independent real ale producers don’t escape either. When we spoke, Watt was scathing of the suggestion that Brewdog had anything to do with the ‘Great British beer tradition’, dismissing the real ale target audience as “guys in their 50s with leather waistcoats and beards, that hang out at train stations at weekends, and go and do the Tolkien Trail in New Zealand on their holidays”. Even greater scorn is reserved for CAMRA — “If you go to a CAMRA beer festival — I’ve been to a few and I wanted to shoot myself in the head after ten minutes. They’re awful places. It’s not going to get people excited about good beer at all. They’ve got bagpipers, they’ve got morris dancers, they’ve got a bunch of weirdos.”

This is par for the course with Brewdog. It reiterates and strengthens their self-assigned status as industry outsiders, visionary geniuses, revolutionaries … artists. The more fights the better — after all, when did you last see Damien Hirst or Tracey Emin ducking out of a controversy? But it’s a strategy that starts to pose problems once success comes knocking. Once nuzzling at the bosom of Charles Saatchi and dining at Number 10, the iconoclastic aura starts to fade. If Brewdog blazed a trail by upsetting the established order, where do they go when they become a part of the established order?

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Begun in 2006 by the two childhood friends with just £40,000 and some second-hand equipment, Brewdog has gone on to great things. It might have made its name as an alternative minnow, taunting the big names and taking irreverent swipes at authority, but now it’s a household name. Its recent ‘Equity for Punks’ scheme, which offered (unlisted) shares in the business and discounts on beer, raised £2.2m — to be invested in a new state-of-the-art brewery, which will boost capacity by more than five times to 150,000 hectolitres. Such is demand for its product that Brewdog decided to outsource some production of their ‘77 lager’ and ‘zeitgeist’ for export to the Meantime brewery in London.

Indeed, its beers are now exported to 26 countries, most recently appearing in bars in Brazil. And its own bars have sprouted up like mushrooms on high streets across the country. Since the opening of the Aberdeen bar at the end of 2010, others have followed in Camden, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Nottingham, with nine more scheduled for 2012. And not only are Brewdog’s beers available in most major supermarkets, not to mention Selfridges, but they even brew own-brand beer for Tesco’s ‘Finest’ range.

So when does a craft beer cease to be a craft beer and start to be a mainstream monster? Does success have to equate with sell-out? And how do you reconcile the label of firebrand anti-establishment revolutionary with phenomenal commercial growth?

These are interesting questions, and ones we’d love to be able to discuss with Brewdog. But, asking for a second brief interview to address more recent events at Brewodog, we are directed through a PR agency and asked to submit all questions by the rather unpunk-like medium of e-mail.

“Beer that’s about savouring the flavours, enjoying food. Beer to get excited about what’s in the glass, as opposed to the effect it has on you”

The essence of Watt’s typed reply is that Brewdog is not mainstream because mainstream is bad and they are good. “We’re not mainstream in the traditional sense because we’re still an independent brewery that is dedicated to creating flavourful, artisanal beers and will never cut corners or scrimp on quality to make money,” he writes. “We’re about challenging perceptions of beer and encouraging people to drink craft beer — if we succeed and more people drink expertly crafted beer and it becomes the norm, we will have effectively changed the meaning of mainstream.”

Single-handedly changing the meaning of ‘mainstream’ — one thing you certainly can’t accuse Brewdog of is underselling itself. But, more seriously, you wonder why Brewdog protests so much. What’s wrong with being mainstream? Are the Beatles, Kate Bush, Radiohead or David Bowie less credible for their success? Or, to use Watt’s own musical analogy, is a Clash CD any less good because you can buy it in Tesco? Watt and Dickie are justifiably proud of, even bullish about, their success — Watt’s (again typed) answer to the question “Where next?” is “World domination” — so why do they continue to cling to the subversive label, like a middle-aged businessman still putting up Che Guevara posters in his bedroom?

Of course, Brewdog are not anarchists, as they’d like you to believe. They are astute businessmen — generating publicity for a fraction of the cost of advertising, and cultivating intense customer loyalty, to the extent that they can persuade fans of their beer to buy into the company in return for perks such as a lifetime product discounts.

Not only that, but behind the tabloid-enraging headlines is a business that has backed measures to curb binge drinking — Brewdog was involved in lobbying the government to permit the sale of beer in two-thirds of a pint, and was also the first company to publicly back the Scottish Government’s proposals for a minimum price per alcohol unit. Watt also claims that they don’t and will never make cheap deals with supermarkets to shift more bottles.

Ask them about how they want to see people drink, and it could easily be coming out of the mouth of a politician or health professional: “It’s [about] smaller amounts, it’s [about] becoming more knowledgeable about what you’re drinking — I think the more knowledge people have about something, the more respect they have for it, [and they are] much less likely to abuse it.”

And their goal? “To make other people as passionate about good beer as we are”, “to show people a different side of beer”, “Beer that’s about savouring the flavours, enjoying food, beer to get excited about what’s in the glass, as opposed to the effect it has on you.” All of which is great news. This is what we want our beer producers to be, and what we want beer to be. But it’s hardly anarchy. Alternative punks? Snarling iconoclasts? Don’t believe the hype. These boys just brew nice beer.

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‘Angry Young Brewers (When Beer Meets Art)’ is a feature from Issue 1 – The Gin Issue, which is available to buy from our shop.