A BBC investigation discovered that Scottish independent brewery Brewdog shipped kegs of beer to the US in 2016 and 2017 without disclosing all of the ingredients. The ingredients in question are extracts that are used in the beers Elvis Juice, a grapefruit IPA and Jet Black Heart, a nitro oatmeal stout. At the time, the extracts had not been submitted for approval (they have since been approved).
“The BBC has seen evidence that suggests US treasury officials from the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) were given false information on at least five occasions during a six-month period, which meant that potentially hundreds of kegs of beer were sent with incorrect labelling – a violation of TTB laws,” stated the BBC article linked below.
Since the TTB statute of limitations is only three (3) years, the TTB stated no further action will be taken.
Brewdog cofounder James Watt recently posted an article on LinkedIn detailing mistakes made as CEO of Brewdog. This snippet below from that article addresses this particular issue with the extracts. Additional details are in the article as well.
“The process of importing our own beer was new to us and we took some shortcuts to get the beer to America on time and we made some mistakes with the paperwork on the first few shipments. All applicable taxes were always paid in full, but the paperwork was not always correct in the first few months back in 2017 and we did not realise we needed to get things like the Elvis Juice recipe and ingredients approved in advance (although this was subsequently approved),” said James Watt.
For you humans in Scotland, the claims will be part of a 60 minute documentary on BBC One Scotland on Monday 24 January at 19:00 UT.
SOURCE: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-60054053
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