Tied house

In the UK a tied house is a public house that is required to buy at least some of its beer from a particular brewery or pub company. This is in contrast to a free house, which is able to choose the beers it stocks freely.

A report for the UK government described the tied pub system as "one of the most inter‐woven industrial relationships you can identify in the UK, with multiple streams of payments running in both directions, from the pub tenant to the pubco and vice versa, generally negotiated on a pub‐by‐pub basis."

Free and tied houses

The pub itself may be owned by the brewery or pub company in question, with the publican renting the pub from the brewery or pub company. This is termed a tenancy. Alternatively, the brewery may appoint a salaried manager while retaining ownership of the pub; this arrangement is a "managed house". Finally, a publican may finance the purchase of a pub with soft loans (usually a mortgage) from a brewer and be required to buy his beer from it in return. The traditional advantage of tied houses for breweries was the steadiness of demand they gave them; a tied house would not change its beer supplier suddenly, so the brewer had a consistent market for its beer production.