The Pub Industry Is on Its Knees

Let's start with the inconvenient truth about your biggest potential market. The UK pub industry is in serious decline. Pubs are closing at a rate of roughly one per day. An estimated 378 pubs permanently closed in 2025, continuing a trend that has seen 15,000 pubs — one in four — disappear since the start of the century. Every region of England and Wales recorded a net loss.

The causes are well documented: crippling business rates, soaring energy costs, rising wages, employer National Insurance contributions, and beer duty all eating into margins that were already razor-thin. A pub might earn 78–80% gross margin on a pint, but after staffing, utilities, rates, VAT, and card processing, net profit often falls to 10–15% or lower. And that's before the 2026 business rates revaluation, which is set to increase the average pub's rateable value by 30%.

Meanwhile, supermarket cheap alcohol continues to undercut the on-trade. 2014 was the year more alcohol was purchased in supermarkets than in pubs for the first time — a staggering reversal from 1980, when pubs accounted for 87% of all beer sold in the UK. Supermarkets use alcohol as a loss leader, selling it at prices no pub can match, and consumers respond rationally by staying home.

What this means for you as a small brewery is simple: your main customer base is shrinking, struggling, and increasingly unable to pay. Chasing payments from pubs that are barely surviving is a miserable part of the job that nobody tells you about. You'll spend time and energy delivering beer to accounts that pay late, dispute invoices, or quietly go bust owing you money.