--- title: How small breweries take orders from pubs without a distributor Metadescription: How a small brewery takes orders from free houses without a distributor - pub logins, per-pub pricing, delivery days, cut-offs, and chasing payment. Display description: Sell direct to free houses and the order desk is yours - the Friday ring-round, a different price for every pub, delivery days that match your dray, and payment to chase across dozens of accounts. author: Dan Edwards author_role: Founder author_url: https://danedwardsdeveloper.com author_linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dan-edwards-developer published: 2026-05-28 --- # How small breweries take orders from pubs without a distributor By **[Dan Edwards](https://wholesalehandler.com/about)**, Founder. Cutting out the distributor wins you the margin and the direct line to the cellar. It also hands you the whole order desk - working out which pubs you can even sell to, ringing round for next week's order, holding a different price for each one, fitting deliveries to your dray, and chasing payment across every account yourself. The ordering half of that is the part that quietly eats a Friday. It's also the part that's easiest to move off the phone. ## Which pubs you can actually sell to In the UK, a pub falls into one of three groups, and only one of them is freely yours to sell to. - Free houses choose their own beer. The licensee owns the decision, so these are where a self-distributing brewery starts - roughly 17,000 of them. - Tied and leased pubs buy through the pub company or brewery they're tied to, usually at a set price. Some allow a guest ale or a local "free of tie" line, which is the crack worth knocking on, but the core range isn't yours to win. - Managed pubs stock what the owning company decides centrally. Not a direct-sale target. So the realistic order book is free houses, free-of-tie guest lines, and independent bars and restaurants. They share a trait that makes a self-service order desk worth it - each one decides its own order, on its own cellar's schedule, and reorders from you week after week. ## Replace the Friday ring-round with a pub login The phone blitz exists because the brewery is the only one who can write the order down. Give each pub a login and that flips - the cellar does its stock check, opens its account, and places the order when it suits them, not when you happen to call. A pub ordering at 11pm after close, looking at the actual gaps on the stillage, places a more accurate order than a landlord guessing down the phone at 4pm mid-shift. Past orders are right there to repeat, so the steady lines go in with a couple of taps and you're left talking about what's new, not transcribing quantities. ## Put a cut-off in front of your delivery days Self-distribution runs on a delivery rhythm - the days your van actually goes out, and the patch it covers. The order desk has to funnel orders to those days, not take them whenever they land. Set the days you deliver and a cut-off for each, and tie it to your lead time - "order by Tuesday 5pm for Thursday's run." The pub sees the deadline when they order and knows what they've missed if they're late. A cut-off only works if it's enforced. "Orders by Tuesday please" in an email gets ignored the moment a pub realises on Wednesday it's short for the weekend - they'll call, and you'll squeeze it onto the van. A message doesn't hold the line. A form that locks once the cut-off passes does, while still letting you take the genuine emergency by phone on your terms. ## Charge each pub its own price Direct trade pricing is rarely one number. A high-volume account that takes ten casks a week is on a different rate from a bar that takes one. A free house you've supplied for years might be on a better price than a new account still proving it pays on time. Holding that in your head, or in a master spreadsheet you cross-check every time you invoice, is how a pub ends up on last year's price for six months. A price list per tier fixes it - assign each pub to its list, set the price once, and the pub only ever sees its own number. Put your duty rise through in one place and every account on that list sees it on their next order. ## Standing orders for the regular lines Most accounts have a backbone that doesn't change - the house lager, the cask that's always on, the keg line the regulars expect. That order shouldn't need a call every week. A standing order places the regular lineup on a schedule - weekly, fortnightly, three- or four-weekly - and fires it at your cut-off on its own. A few days before each one, the pub gets a preview at the current price with a one-click skip. Closed for a refurb, or the cellar's still full? Skip it. Otherwise it goes through. The rotating guest casks still get picked by hand each week, but the predictable volume places itself. ## Chase payment without a spreadsheet This is the part new self-distributors underestimate. Instead of invoicing one distributor, you're collecting from sixty, eighty, a hundred separate accounts - and a few of them always pay late. Cellar telemetry and dray routes don't help here; knowing who owes you what does. Raise the invoice straight off the order, on the terms you set - net-30, on account, or cash on delivery for the ones who've earned a shorter leash. Then track who's paid without reconciling your bank against a spreadsheet line by line. Check the bank once a week, mark off what's cleared, and the accounts still owing are the ones to chase - no guesswork about which of a hundred pubs slipped. ## What about the empties Casks and kegs are returnable containers with a deposit, and tracking which pub is sitting on how many of yours is real work. Wholesale Handler doesn't do that part - it isn't a returnable-asset or deposit-reconciliation system, and pretending otherwise would only get your container count wrong. What it does is take the order and raise the invoice, and a cask or keg deposit can sit on that invoice as its own line. The physical empties - counting them out, getting them back, squaring the deposit - stay in whatever you use for that now. The order desk and the empties ledger are different jobs. ## How Wholesale Handler runs a brewery order desk Wholesale Handler is a self-service ordering portal for wholesalers. For a brewery selling direct to free houses, it's the order desk and the invoicing - not the van, not the cellar, not the empties. - Pub logins. Each account gets its own login and orders 24/7 from a phone or laptop. No app to download, no call to take, every order in one place the moment it lands. - Delivery days with a cut-off. Set the days your van goes out and a cut-off for each, with a lead time. The form locks once a date closes, so late orders can't land on a run you've already loaded. You write the locked-state message in your own voice. - A price list per pub. Up to 10 named lists, each pub assigned to one, each seeing only its own price. Move an account up a tier as its volume grows; push a duty or cost rise through once and it propagates. - Standing orders for the regulars. Weekly to four-weekly schedules that fire at the cut-off on their own, with a preview email and one-click skip before each. Up to 10 per account, editable any time, pausable for a closure. - Minimum order and delivery charge. Set a minimum spend (your three-cask floor) or a free-delivery threshold, so small drops don't run your van at a loss. - Invoicing and payment tracking on terms. Generate invoices from orders - one at a time, in batches, or all of a pub's un-invoiced orders at once - email them out, and track who's paid without touching the money. No transaction fee, and whatever payment terms you've agreed stay yours. ## What it deliberately doesn't do Wholesale Handler isn't a brewery ERP or a logistics platform. It doesn't plan dray routes, track cask and keg deposits or returns, run your duty and Small Brewers Relief accounting, or process payments. It's the order desk and the paperwork around it, kept simple on purpose. The pull of cutting out the distributor is margin and a direct relationship with the pub. A B2B beer platform hands the logistics back but takes a cut and stands between you and the cellar again. Running your own order desk keeps both the margin and the relationship - the pubs order themselves, the orders land against your delivery days, and you invoice on your own terms. ## Q&A **Q: How does a small brewery take orders from pubs without a distributor?** A: Give each pub a login to a self-service ordering portal, set the days you deliver with a cut-off in front of each, and price each account on its own list. Pubs place and repeat their own orders before the deadline; you invoice straight off the order and deliver on your own van. It works best with free houses, which choose their own beer. **Q: Which pubs can a brewery sell to directly in the UK?** A: Free houses are the main target - the licensee owns the beer decision, and there are around 17,000 of them. Tied and leased pubs buy through their pub company, though some allow a guest ale or a free-of-tie local line. Managed pubs stock what the owning company decides centrally, so they're not a direct-sale route. **Q: How do breweries charge different pubs different prices?** A: Put each pub on a price list and it only ever sees its own price. A high-volume account can sit on a better rate than a new one, and a duty or cost rise goes through in one place rather than account by account. The pub never sees the list name or anyone else's price. **Q: Does a brewery still have to chase payment from every pub itself?** A: Yes - collecting from many individual accounts instead of one distributor is the trade-off of self-distribution, and some pubs always pay late. Invoicing straight off the order plus payment tracking makes it manageable: mark off what's cleared each week and chase only the accounts still owing. Cash on delivery is common for newer accounts. **Q: Can Wholesale Handler track cask and keg deposits and returns?** A: No. It's the order-and-invoice desk, not a returnable-container or deposit-reconciliation system. You can put a cask or keg deposit on the invoice as a line item, but counting empties out and back and squaring the deposit stays in whatever you use for that today.