BrewDog has been censured by the advertising watchdog for misleading claims about the climate credentials of its beers.
The brewery, best known for its Punk IPA beer, claimed its beers were carbon negative in an advertisement.
In the ad launched in July, the company urged consumers to drink its beer to protect their descendants from the climate crisis.
It described the beverage as “Beer for your grandchildren” and claimed BrewDog was “the world’s first carbon negative brewery”.
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) upheld two complaints that the post failed to explain its claims that the beer was in fact carbon negative, meaning the process of making the drink sequestered more carbon than it emitted.
In its ruling, it said: “The ASA considered that consumers would understand from the ad that BrewDog was a carbon negative brewery, meaning that, as a business, they had a net effect of removing more carbon from the atmosphere than they emitted. We considered, within that context, the text ‘Beer for your grandchildren’ reinforced the carbon negative claim.
“However, we considered that there was no information provided in the ad which explained the basis of BrewDog’s ‘carbon negative’ accreditation or the claim ‘Beer for your grandchildren’. Although we acknowledged that the ad referred consumers to a link for the BrewDog website which contained further information about their carbon reduction and offsetting project, we considered that the ad itself did not include information which explained the basis of the claim. Without that information, we considered that consumers would not have sufficient information to understand the basis of the environmental claims in the ad.”
BrewDog’s chief executive, James Watt, criticised the ASA decision in a LinkedIn post.
“You can all sleep more soundly now, knowing that the ASA is protecting you from insufficiently extensive carbon accounting data in your Insta feed,” he said.
He also claimed that “spurious” complaints were likely to be made to regulators by competitors because dealing with them “sucks up a lot of time”.
The beer company has fallen foul of the ASA a number of times in the past, including for a claim that its beverages count towards a target of five portions of fruit and vegetables a day, and that they are healthy. Advertising rules do not permit companies to make positive health claims about alcohol.
The ASA also ruled against the brewer over a promotion that claimed “solid gold” cans worth £15,000 had been hidden in cases of beer. In fact, the cans were made largely of brass and coated with gold plating three-thousandths of a millimetre thick.
BrewDog declined to make any further comment.
