Tue 9th Oct 2018 - BrewDog to launch bar franchise programme BrewDog to launch bar franchise programme: Scottish brewer and retailer BrewDog is to launch a bar franchise programme. The initiative will be trialled in ten UK locations, allowing Equity Punks to establish their own BrewDog bar in their home town. Potential franchise locations include but are not limited to Ayr, North Berwick, Oban, Kirkwall, St Ives, Swansea, Northampton, Huddersfield, Newquay and Stoke-on-Trent. The process will launch during an Equity Punk Franchise Open Day at the company’s headquarters in Ellon next month. The bar franchise programme was announced in BrewDog’s new blueprint, which outlines its plans for the next ten years. It also reveals a number of product and distribution innovations the brewer has been working on. One is The Hop Hub, a new distribution centre near Glasgow, which is set to be Europe’s first fully refrigerated beer warehouse. The company also unveiled the BrewDog Foundation, a £1m annual fund that will be donated to charitable causes chosen by its team and Equity Punks. This is an evolution of its Unicorn Fund, which launched in 2016 and saw BrewDog share 10% of its profits among its team. This was extended to include a further 10% of profits shared to charities. The blueprint also reveals BrewDog will relaunch its Development Fund, with up to £200,000 available each year to help small craft brewers and startups become established. BrewDog’s first Development Fund partner is Dope & Dank, a US-based company on a “mission to bring craft beer to a more diverse audience”. BrewDog also revealed it would start producing some of its classic beers in cask as well as reviving iconic recipes from the past decade as voted for by its community. Co-founder James Watt said: “This is our manifesto for the next decade of Dog – a public declaration of how we are going to progress our unerring mission of making other people as passionate about great craft beer as we are. We are determined to show craft beer can be a force for good in the world and we’ll continue to build a new type of business with our community firmly at the helm. There is nothing more important to us than our beer and our people, which includes not only our amazing team but also the global community we have built. This blueprint showcases how we will fight tooth and nail for what we believe in as we aim to make a meaningful impact on both the world of beer and the world of business.”