Brewdog’s China deal shows the limits of ESG virtue-signalling

O, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to make commercial hay from a human rights campaign, as Walter Scott very nearly wrote. Brewdog are the latest example of a brand which has made much of its holier than thou culture – only to ditch it in full when the reward is too big to ignore. 

The short story is thus: Brewdog, keen as ever for publicity, launched an anti-Qatar advertising campaign in the run-up to the World Cup, apparently in solidarity with the myriad groups that have suffered at that particular regime’s hands. “Taking a stand is always better than saying nothing,” said Brewdog’s boss James Watt. 

Fast forward a few months, and Brewdog has signed a bumper deal with Budweiser to flog its craft beer all across China. Yes, that China, the one with a list of human rights abuses as long as your arm and that most international observers believe to be committing some version of a genocide against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang. 

There’s nothing wrong with Brewdog’s decision to go big in China; it’s a growing market, and it will no doubt do well. It’ll create jobs, and revenue, and contribute to economic growth. 

But what sticks in the craw is the hypocrisy of it all. 

Now, Brewdog are a special case; CEO Watt enjoys the headlines, albeit not perhaps the ones about his management style and the “rotten culture” that former employees accused him of overseeing. 

But perhaps there is a chink of good news in the reaction to Brewdog’s convenient picking and choosing of their human rights causes. It is not just us who’ve clocked the inconsistency. The more we hear of ‘ESG commitments’ from British businesses, the more sceptics there are asking whether they’re worth the paper they’re written on. And goodness knows the whole ESG movement could do with a little more scrutiny.