Profit has been detected inside BrewDog. Tilray Brands has declared BrewDog profitable for its fiscal first quarter, the three months ended Aug. 31, 2026, and the beverage business it now anchors grew 82% to $101.5 million. Tilray reported the results Thursday, Oct. 8, in an earnings release filed with the SEC.
On the same day, Tilray CEO Irwin Simon told analysts the company is still shrinking its U.S. craft brewery network, with a goal of five or six facilities.
Both things can be true on Earth at once.
How Tilray got BrewDog profitable
BrewDog added $55.9 million of revenue in the quarter, CFO Carl Merton said on the earnings call. Tilray’s own headline put it plainly: “BrewDog Achieves Profitability in Q1.” A summary of the call published with a TradingKey transcript adds that BrewDog needed no cash injection and was self-financing.
Asked how years of losses flipped so fast, Simon pointed to several things, according to the transcript (an auto-generated record, so the wording here is paraphrased). Tilray didn’t take on many of the bars and pubs that were losing money, or many of the leases, when it took over BrewDog after the administration process. It also right-sized staffing, put cost controls in place, moved away from unprofitable lines such as spirits (which BrewDog had already shut down) and had a strong World Cup summer at the bars it kept open.
Merton said the deal cost about $50 million in purchase price, plus another $50 million of short-term funding while cash collections caught up.
Then an analyst asked how beverage would have done without BrewDog. Simon said it would have been down, which he put down to cutting SKUs and brands, per the transcript.
Translation for alien readers: the new Scottish arrival is carrying the beer business while the American breweries get trimmed.
Tilray’s U.S. craft breweries: from 8 to 10 down to 5 or 6
Tilray built its American beer portfolio fast. Simon recapped it on the call: SweetWater in 2020, then Montauk, the brands it bought from Anheuser-Busch in 2023 and brands from Molson Coors. That left Tilray with 8 to 10 breweries, he said, according to the transcript.
By his account, Tilray has since closed smaller breweries, naming Revolver, Terrapin and Fort Collins, and sold Atwater. He said there is probably one more brewery Tilray could close and fold into others, but he did not name it. The goal, he said, is five or six facilities with large capacity in strategic locations.
The Bureau will not guess which entity is next. Tilray didn’t say.
The quarter by the numbers
All figures below come from Tilray’s earnings release and compare the first quarter of fiscal 2027 with the same quarter a year earlier.
| Metric | Q1 FY2027 | Q1 FY2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Net revenue | $257.1M | $209.5M |
| Beverage net revenue | $101.5M | $55.7M |
| Beverage gross margin | 41% | 38% |
| Net income (loss) | ($40.0M) | $1.5M |
| Adjusted EBITDA | $9.2M | $10.2M |
Tilray said the net loss was “driven predominantly by non-cash charges,” and that adjusted EBITDA absorbed about $1.7 million in global fuel surcharges. It reaffirmed guidance of $68 million to $75 million in adjusted EBITDA for the fiscal year ending May 31, 2027.
Carlsberg lands in January
Tilray’s release says Carlsberg “has partnered with Tilray to begin producing and selling its iconic brands in the U.S. market starting January 1, 2027.” The call summary names Carlsberg, Carlsberg Elephant and Kronenbourg 1664 Blanc, to be brewed in Tilray’s U.S. plants, with Tilray handling marketing, sales and distribution under a profit-sharing arrangement. Tilray didn’t put a number on the revenue it expects.
So more beer from abroad will flow through fewer American breweries. Our analysts will keep watching for the name of that last closure.
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