BREWDOG could become a listed business in as little as three years after receiving a private equity cash injection that valued the Aberdeenshire craft-beer maker at £1 billion.

BrewDog chairman James Watt, who styles himself as the company’s captain, said that while the drinks-maker “managed to do a deal with a 10-year time horizon”, it “would look to list in four or five years’ time”.

This could be cut back even further if the track record of San Francisco-based TSG Consumer Partners, which has paid £213 million for a 22.3 per cent stake in the Ellon-based business, is anything to go by. Big-name brands that TSG has previously invested in include Vitamin Water-maker Glaceau and Popchips, with the private equity house exiting its positions after three and four years respectively.

While both those exits were via trade sales, Mr Watt, who has personally received a cash windfall of over £50m as part of the TSG investment, said one of the reasons that BrewDog went with TSG was that it has “a great track record in taking companies public”.

“We saw so many companies and turned down a couple of higher offers because they weren’t completely aligned with our way of thinking,” he said.

“We couldn’t find any investors in the UK that shared our vision, that believe in the business as much as we do and are aligned with our way of doing things.

“What we loved about [TSG] is that they’re all about growth. They’re all about investing and so many of the other funds were looking to derive value from efficiencies and financial engineering.

He added: “The TSG deal enables us to take our five-year business plan and do it in two years.”

That plan includes the construction of a £5m hotel next to BrewDog’s Ellon brewery that is expected to create 80 jobs in the local area. Although the proposal has been mired in controversy after the beer-maker fell out with Aberdeenshire Council over the price it was charging for the land, Mr Watt said they are getting close to inking a deal.

“We’ll hopefully have good news on that in the next few weeks,” he said.

Other plans include the launch of between five and ten “mini-tap room” bars in both the UK and the US, with each costing in the region of £1m to £1.5m, a hotel in the US, a waste water treatment plant in Scotland and breweries in Asia and Australia.

In total around £100m of TSG’s investment will be used to fund these projects, with the remainder being used to buy out some of the shares held by Mr Watt, his co-founder Martin Dickie and other directors. The largest payout is going to Mr Watt, whose shareholding in the business has reduced from 35 per cent to 25 per cent, with Mr Dickie, whose position has reduced from 30 per cent to around 22 per cent, receiving a slightly smaller cash sum.

A further £13m has been set aside to allow the company’s so-called equity punks - investors who bought shares via BrewDog’s four crowdfunding rounds - to sell up to 15 per cent of their equity, capped at 40 shares, to TSG. The terms of that offer will be forwarded to shareholders this week.

While Mr Watt said that those who invested in the earliest financing rounds will benefit from the company’s valuation increasing by 2,756 per cent in the intervening period, from £26m to £1bn, early investors have effectively been sidelined by the TSG deal.

Not only has the private equity house been issued with preference shares that entitle it to a compounded return of 18 per cent a year on exit that small investors will not receive, but each existing share has now been turned into 10, reducing the value per share in the process.

While Mr Watt said that the company had received “overwhelming” support for the plan at a general meeting held in March, he admitted that just 116 of BrewDog’s 32,000 equity punks cast a vote, 16 in person and 100 by proxy.

Despite this, he said the company remains committed to the crowdfunding model and would seek to raise further capital from equity punks in future.

“That community element is key to the business and we want to continue to build that community in the UK and internationally,” he said.

“A lot of the other investors [BrewDog had discussions with] saw our equity punk element as a nuisance but it’s the heart and soul of our business and TSG completely bought into that.”