Everything in America is bigger: cars, farms, Big Gulps and even BrewDog. The Scotland-based brewer, which plans to open its U.S. headquarters in Canal Winchester this summer, recently filed papers with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission showing that it expects operations here will eclipse those in the United Kingdom, where BrewDog is the No. 1 craft-beer maker.

Everything in America is bigger: cars, farms, Big Gulps and even BrewDog.

The Scotland-based brewer, which plans to open its U.S. headquarters in Canal Winchester this summer, recently filed papers with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission showing that it expects operations here will eclipse those in the United Kingdom, where BrewDog is the No. 1 craft-beer maker.

The company will offer a little more than 1 million shares of stock in a crowdfunding program to raise up to $50 million. BrewDog is spending $30 million on the headquarters and brewery it is building here.

BrewDog hopes to build enough business in the U.S. to triple the size of its 100,000-square foot plant in Canal Winchester. Plans also call for beginning distribution to 20 states this year before expanding to all 50 states and Canada. It also wants to build a network of brewpubs across the U.S. and add a second brewhouse to wring 1.5 million barrels a year out of its tanks.

�Which is more (barrels) than all the breweries in the state of Ohio are brewing,� said Mary MacDonald, executive director of the Ohio Craft Brewers Association, �and that includes our Sam Adams and Great Lakes Brewing Co. breweries. It seems highly ambitious in an awesome sense.�

Such ambition requires money, a great crush of capital.

BrewDog has grown rapidly in the U.K., opening dozens of craft beer bars by raising tens of millions of dollars through crowdfunding. It has allowed the company to avoid a lot of debt or being directed by large private investors.

It plans to do the same thing in the U.S., but on a much larger scale. The U.S. stock offering would dwarf all of the fundraising BrewDog has done in four different �Equity for Punks� phases. The details have not been released yet, but BrewDog will sell shares amounting to ownership of just over 14 percent of its U.S. operation, giving the U.S. business a value of about $350 million before it�s brewed a single drop of its signature India pale ale.

The mechanism for selling these shares is new. The SEC created it as part of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, or JOBS Act, and approved it last year. It gives companies the right to sell up to $50 million in shares online to non-institutional investors, or in layman�s terms, anyone. The minimum purchase is two shares for $95, the same as the most recent phase of BrewDog�s fundraising campaign in the U.K.

MacDonald thinks BrewDog�s U.S. crowdfunding will find a huge reservoir of fans.

�We have a larger craft beer audience (than in the U.K.),� MacDonald said. �BrewDog is hugely popular. They have a big following thanks to their TV show. I have a friend who is a huge fan and the minute they release (shares of the U.S. operation) he will be totally on that.�

Kendall Almerico, a Florida-based lawyer who specializes in crowdfunding and is representing BrewDog, calls the share offering a �mini-IPO.� The scheme is much cheaper than a public stock offering and comes with few of the downsides, like powerful investors who expect a quick return on their money. The law also allows companies to advertise the stock offering.

�Private companies have never been allowed to do anything like this before,� Almerico said. � They were mostly limited to raising money from the rich and well-connected before this law went into effect last year.�

Not many companies have used the new law and of those that have, BrewDog has been the most ambitious, Almerico said.

That�s not surprising. The company often plays up its brash personality and tendency to not just take the path less traveled, but to cut its own path. Co-founder James Watt lays out much of his philosophy in a recently released book, �Business for Punks� which carries the subtitle of, �Break all the rules � the BrewDog way.�

In the filing, BrewDog said it plans to use almost half of the proceeds from the stock offering, $22.5 million, to open brewpubs.

People who invest in BrewDog will be able to buy and sell shares privately or via some future trading platform, but that has not been finalized yet, Almerico said. The shares are recognized as a financial instrument, like the stock of a publicly traded company. BrewDog doesn�t have to release quarterly earnings, but instead must publish financial documents twice a year, he said.

jmalone@dispatch.com