Fit-Out: Where the Real Money Disappears

You've got your kit and your unit. Now you need to turn an empty industrial shell into a functioning brewery. This is where budgets go to die.

### Electrical

You cannot bodge electrical work in a commercial premises. You might be handy enough to wire a plug or run a cable at home, but a brewery needs a proper electrical installation — three-phase power for your larger equipment, correctly rated circuits, RCD protection, emergency stops, and everything documented with an installation certificate from a qualified electrician. Without that certificate, your insurance is void and your landlord can terminate your lease. This isn't optional.

Materials are not cheap right now, and electricians' rates reflect the demand. Expect to pay somewhere between £1,500 and £5,000 to get your electrical installation to a compliant, functional state — and that's before you start adding extras like additional sockets, exterior lighting, or dedicated circuits for things like a canning line or cold room compressor. If your unit needs a three-phase supply installed from scratch, you're talking to the distribution network operator, and that adds cost and weeks of waiting.

### Plumbing

Plumbing is more forgiving. You can do a reasonable amount yourself if you're competent — running water lines, fitting taps, connecting hoses. But you'll still need a professional for anything involving mains water connections, backflow prevention devices, and potentially gas work if you're heating with gas. And whatever you plumb yourself, it needs to be done properly. A leak in a domestic kitchen is an inconvenience. A leak in a brewery can damage stock, equipment, and the building itself.

### Flooring

This is the one that blindsides people. Flooring can be the single most expensive part of your brewery fit-out — more than the electrics, more than the plumbing, sometimes more than the brewing equipment itself.

Here's why. A brewery is a wet environment. Water, wort, beer, cleaning chemicals — they're on the floor constantly. You cannot realistically work in a brewhouse or fermenter area without a wet floor. You can try to keep it dry, but you'll add hours to every brew day mopping, squegeeing, and managing spillage instead of actually brewing. A properly designed wet floor with drainage is not a luxury — it's a basic operational requirement.

The problem is that proper wet flooring is expensive. You need a surface that's waterproof, chemical-resistant, non-slip, durable enough to withstand heavy equipment and foot traffic, and properly laid with falls toward drainage points. The drainage itself — channels, gullies, connections to the sewer — adds another layer of cost and complexity, especially if your unit doesn't already have floor drainage in the right places. Cutting new drainage channels into a concrete floor is messy, disruptive, and expensive.

People try to cut corners with floor paint. It's cheap and quick to apply, and it looks fine on day one. It will not look fine six months later. Standard floor paint is not resistant to the chemicals used in a brewery — caustic soda, peracetic acid, phosphoric acid. It degrades, it peels, it lifts, and within months you've got a patchy, slippery, unhygienic surface that you'll need to strip and redo. You've spent the money twice and still don't have a proper floor.

What you actually need is something that can take the punishment: vinyl sheeting, dairy-grade tiles, or an epoxy resin floor system. All of these are significantly more expensive than paint, and they need to be installed properly — which usually means professional installation. A resin floor for a modest brewery area can easily run into the thousands. Tiling with proper drainage can cost even more. But do it once, do it right, and it'll last. Do it cheap and you'll be redoing it within a year, having already ruined the cheap version with acid and caustic.