BrewDog starts work on £25m “biggest project” brewery: Scottish brewer and retailer BrewDog has begun work on a £25m new brewery site at its headquarters in Ellon, Aberdeenshire aiming to increase production five-fold in what it describes as its biggest endeavour so far. The company has now raised more than £6m from its latest crowdfunding drive and is investing £3m of this in the new brewery immediately. The company stated: “Prior to the beginning of Equity for Punks IV, we had talked about the idea of expanding our Ellon site – but only really in passing. Now, we can fully dial you in on exactly what is set to occupy the near 5,500 square feet site, adjacent to our current brewhouse. It’s nothing short of the single biggest project that we have ever undertaken. We have now raised over £6m from Equity for Punks IV and the first £3m has been directly ploughed into this project, to allow us to keep up with the demand for our beers, create more jobs and continue to add to our growth potential. When complete in February 2016, Site 3 will increase our capacity fivefold, housing a bespoke Ziemann 300HL brewhouse, which will operate in tandem with our existing 100HL brewhouse. We estimate that this brewery expansion will create over 130 new jobs for our Ellon site, both in production and in the new three-storey offices that are part of the plans. Our site three expansion is an amazing undertaking. Overall, the project will cost in the region of £25m making it by a long, long way the biggest endeavour we have ever undertaken. Every single penny that we are investing in the project will go to continuing our mission to make the very best beers we can, and get them into your hands and glasses as quickly as possible. And even when we cut the blue opening ribbon with a chainsaw (or something else typically BrewDog), we will still be a fraction the size of US craft brewers like Stone, Sierra Nevada or Lagunitas – and we can grow to ten times our current size and still be less than 0.5% of the UK beer market. The expansion comes hot on the heels of the installation of our new 10HL pilot plant as well as our new state of the art canning line. With all of these investments our only focus is in buying equipment and building a brewery completely focussed on brewing the very best beers in the world.” BrewDog’s current funding drive means it has a £305 million valuation – an eye-watering 115 times earnings. All Street, which produces research on crowdfunding, points out that this probably makes it Europe’s most aggressively valued brewer. For comparison, Heineken trades on 27.08 times earnings, Carlsberg is valued at 21.47 times earnings, Budweiser and Stella maker AB InBev is worth 21.83 times what it makes in profit, and Peroni brewer SABMiller is at 24.46 times earnings. All Street’s chief executive Emanuela Vartolomei told Business Insider: “BrewDog has performed exceptionally well. It is a strong company with sustainability at its heart and a talented workforce. However, it is difficult to see how investors will make a financial return on this deal given the high valuation of £305 million. No financial forecast has been disclosed so there is very little clarity as to how the company will hit the revenue targets required to generate a risk adjusted return for investors.”