Building a Brewery - Part Three - Permission to Launch

Aside from an actual plan and of course making sure you’ve got the money – both of which we’ve covered in the first two parts of this mini series – another critical part for us or indeed anyone setting up shop from home is to properly make sure you’ve got the right permissions in place.

To be honest this was one of the most stressful parts of starting the brewery. Everything else was down to us. This? In someone else's hands entirely.

When we talk about permission to launch we’re really talking about all the legal parts of setting up the brewery. That of course means legal permissions and structures to the business, so in this part we’re gonna (briefly) cover:

• Setting up the business in a legal sense

• Getting bonafide business bank accounts set up

• Accounting

• Licensing

• Planning permissions and building regulations

At this point it’s important to say that we can never offer advice on your own personal situation, you should always seek out professional advice on any legal issue. This is purely ‘the way what we did it’ kind of stuff.

Lets start with the easy part, forming your business. There are a ton of companies out there that will charge you somewhere in the region of £100 to form your business on your behalf, ensuring that from a legal point of view it’s all set up in the way you want it. If putting you mind at ease is what you want then this could be a great avenue for you.

For us we felt like we’d done enough research to complete the process ourselves, which was in essence filling in some forms for Companies House. It cost us £12 and was completed in about an hour.

So now we’re directors of an actual legal business we thought it be prudent to get a bank account to put a chunk of money in and start to spend it building our brewery…

…turns out not as straight forward as we thought. See banks want to know you’re an actual business and not some bogus money laundering scam. Who knew! So, naturally asked for proof of activity or intent (a customer for example). Without any of those at this point the bank politely told us to come back another time. This was frankly a bit of a pain in the arse. You see we wanted to easily track what we were spending and having the money all in one place was a great way to do that. For the time being though we needed to stick with tracking all spending, every time we spent anything down to the last penny.

So on to other legal matters then and to things that would allow us to get a bank account too. The thi no the bank really wanted to see and  of course to be legally allowed to brew beer commercially and sell it on to shops we needed two things, a brewers license and Alcohol Wholesales Registration Scheme (AWRS) number, both of which are free to get and both come from HMRC.

We were on quite a tight time frame so decided to try speed up the process by naively apply for both at once. Don’t do that.

To get an AWRS number you need to have your brewers license first. If you don’t your AWRS application will be denied which ain’t a situation you want. Thankfully we had two absolutely golden contacts at HMRC (one for the brewers license and one for AWRS) who gave us some great advice through the process. Inevitably it did delay things somewhat, to the point where the brewers license was the last thing we were waiting for to get going but hey that’s life isn’t it. Plan it properly and HMRC have timeframes to get things done, KPI’s if you will so at least you know how long the process will take at the most.

Things we needed to do through the brewers license and AWRS process was to present our business plan, put together a scale drawing of the brewery including where all the ‘pots’ will be. Ensure that the space was fit for purpose and that we had a clear understand of the plan in terms of how often we would be brewing, how we were measuring the ABV of the beers, what due diligence plan we had for our suppliers/customers and of course how everything was going to be recorded should we ever need to be inspected. For AWRS we also needed at least one trade customer lined up. If we were going through this process again I’d really think about how we were going to record sales as much as brews too just for our monthly duty return. We’ve got a pretty slick system now but it was a bit of a pain in the rear end to start with.

Now with our business plan, brewers licence and AWRS we were a green light for our bank account too. Boom.

Of course you can’t sell any booze anywhere without a premises licence. At the same time as sorting bank accounts and brewers licenses we also cracked on with arranging our licences. This I think was the thing I was the most nervous about getting. I was pretty sure we would be fine for the brewers license and AWRS as that was all stuff that was in our hands. Mess that up and it was our fault. Licensing was all out of our control.

First things first. I needed a personal license before we could do anything else. For your personal license you need a relevant qualification. There are almost daily BIIAB accredited courses run locally that you can attend. These one day courses tend to end with the certifications you need for your personal license. Typically I couldn’t find one in the near future I could do and I didn’t want to use up me precious annual leave either so opted for one of the many online courses instead. Course reading done and a mock exam pass I booked my exam swiftly and cracked on. The online exam was surreal. On Zoom, in an empty room with an invigilator watching you from got knows where it was done fairly swiftly with a pass and a nice certificate to boot.

From then I needed to submit my personal license application with a recent photo, DBS check and payment.

Once the personal license arrived we moved swiftly on to the premises license.

We never had any intention of anyone coming to the house to drink or pick up beer to drink elsewhere. That being said we were still going to be applying for a premises license to sell our beers from our home. Honestly I didn’t have any idea whether that was going to be something our local licensing department would entertain.

I honestly, before applying for licenses or spending loads of money on the brewery, just thought let’s talk to them about it first to see what they say. The response I got was actually very encouraging. It turns out issuing premises licenses on residential properties was quite common place. Remember that a licensing authorities wants to ensure all licensing objectives are met. If they are then there is no reason why your application would be denied. That said I thought it would only take one objection from a neighbour and the whole thing could turn into a bit of a nightmare. Good news. We’ve got kick ass neighbours.

With that in mind, amongst other things, we made sure we wrote it into our application that nobody connected to the business (customers or staff) would ever come to the property. We didn’t want that anyway. The only people coming would be to make deliveries. We also agreed to ensure that we were brewing during sociable hours of the day. Together with our detailed scale brewery plans we sent off our application, placed our ad in the local rag and…waited.

We had one representation from one of the councils departments (I can’t remember which one now) around under age drinking and how we would control that by selling online. That we had a ready thought about but hadn’t been clear enough in our application about it. Essentially though we agreed to deliver locally ourselves so could ID people on delivery if necessary and to only use couriers who require signature from someone over 18 for deliveries further afield. We also make a big song and dance about our Challenge 25 policy on the website and any order confirmations and updates we send out. It’s really important after all!

Since that was all ironed out our application was granted and our we could legally sell beer from home. Lovely jubly…

…or so we thought. As part of the process the licensing department send your application off to various other council departments. One of them is planning. We’d done our research around this and were sure we didn’t need to apply for planning for a change of use as the brewery made up such a small part of our home. The planning department weren’t so sure and we received a very scary letter advising us were in breach of planning and a visit was imminent. Oh god! Remember this is all happening concurrently with us doing a lot of the works we needed to do. We’d spent a sh*t load of money by this point. Our worst nightmare was coming true.

I called our appointed contact in the planning department. He was great I have to say. Obviously when a planning department are advised of a brewery staring from a house that they don’t know about it they need to check it out. He did just that, coming over for a cuppa and a 30 second show round of our tiny brewery and went on his way. A week or so later we got a letter to confirm we were fine to continue as we were.

Finally get Quickbooks (or similar). Most of these accounting packages cost about £25 a month but are a great investment. For us Quickbooks integrates with our website, POS and bank account so it’s pretty easy to manage the money and avoids us having to use for awful spreadsheets and the like. It’s also ensured we can avoid appointing an accountant (for now at least) as we’re trading at such a low turnover at the moment. An important cost saved.

From there on in from a legal point of view it was a case of squaring off a couple of rough edges like making sure electrical work was certified and our processes for accounting and tax were all sound and we were done.

Next up? Time to buy another power tool!