Mike4 wrote:didds wrote:so what about the micro breweries who principally use 30L key kegs, and cider producers that typically ship in 20L BiB ?
Surely it simply encourages them to change to selling in 40+ litre containers. 20 litres strikes me as a trivially small quantity for a commercial brewer of cider or beer to be selling to a pub or any other type of boozer. When I go to the pub in a group of say six, we might conservatively drink three pints each which is a total trade for the pub of 18 pints or 10 litres. If a retail premises has sales so small it can't sell 40 litres of <whatever> before it goes off there is little hope for them as a business so I don't see 40 litre containers as much of a problem.
It is a problem - as didds explained, the trend on the bar is for more choice which means smaller containers. Particularly since bars tend to work on an 80/20 kind of principle - the vast majority of the volume is probably going through 3-4 taps, but there's a long tail which can still be usefully profitable. I imagine you and your friends aren't buying 18 pints of imperial stout or wheat beer, but a few people a week might have a pint. Same with small-producer cider.
And increasingly there's a move to serve cask ale other than mainstream styles in pins (20.4l) rather than firkins (40.9l), just to maintain freshness and hence quality.
Also it's non-trivial for breweries to change package size if they're using reusable containers as their keg/cask fleet is one of their major expenses - just before the Budget Lost & Grounded ordered an extra 1200 30l kegs, which must have cost them £60k or so.
Mike4 wrote:More interesting is the announcement that wine etc is to be taxed according to alcohol content instead of price. This strikes me as an EXCELLENT idea as the tax element of bottles of better wines will be going down. Ok more expensive wine is not necessarily 'better' but I'm sure you'll see my point.
The major tax on wine will still be VAT which is based on price. Historically wine duty was based on volume, not price. It's actually a Brussels directive that makes wine taxed on volume and not by alcohol, but you'd imagine that if the UK had asked, it would probably have been possible to add the option to tax by alcohol. So this is what freedom means! And the 2.8% level for table beer is another thing that came from Brussels.