Crowdfunding

Scottish craft beer maker BrewDog expands into US

Luke Graham, special to CNBC
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Brewdog, an independent craft beer brewery based in Scotland, will start producing beer at a U.S. site, the firm said on Wednesday after announcing a £6 million ($9.17 million) mini-bond sale earlier this week.

The Scottish company, which was formed in 2007, said it has bought a 42-acre site in Columbus, Ohio, where it will build a 200 barrel production facility.

"(The U.S.) is a fantastic craft brew market," BrewDog co-founder James Watt told CNBC. "It's really tough for us to service that market from Scotland due to the system and the time it takes to get beer there.

"We are excited to be making our beers in America hopefully sometime late summer next year."

The facility will also allow BrewDog to export craft beer to key markets in Canada and South America.

BrewDog is 'funded by craft beer lovers'
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BrewDog is 'funded by craft beer lovers'

In April, BrewDog launched its fourth equity sale program called "Equity for Punks IV" to raise £25 million through crowdfunding, where small amounts of money are raised from a large number of people, to expand the company.

According to BrewDog, the firm has so far raised £8 million. In order to reach their target, the company announced on Tuesday that it had launched a combined equity and bond sale through U.K. crowdfunding website Crowdcube.

"Crowdcube are the absolute best at what they do in the U.K.," said Watt. "They have an active community of almost 200,000 investors, people who love investing in exciting, small companies so for us it takes our business, it takes our beer and it takes our Equity for Punks offer to a whole new captive audience."

Read More Craft beer: Crowdfunding a brewery

BrewDog is offering unsecured, four-year mini-bonds with a return of 6.5 percent and aims to raise £6 million through the sale.

"We wanted to think about how we could put together something that was slightly different to the Equity Punks offer, which is awesome and doing really well for us. Something that gave investors a different type of investment proposition and a different type of return," Watt said, explaining why the company had decided to start selling bonds.

BrewDog founders James Watt, left, and Martin Dickie at their production facility in Ellon, Scotland.
BrewDog

Mini-bonds differ to retail bonds as they can't be traded or sold to other investors, but tend to offer higher levels of interest.

Earlier in the year, another Scottish craft beer company, Innis and Gunn, launched a mini-bond sale to finance construction of a brewery. It reached its £3 million target last week.

Watt said the outlook for the craft beer industry was "particularly exciting."

"It's just continuing to explode so I think the prospects for craft beer in the U.K. are fantastic and it is a really good time to be drinking beer and making beer," he added.

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