rent boys

Worrying trends as well as hopeful signs in the beer and pub business. The growing and flourishing trend for new microbreweries is not being matched by the existing stalwarts of the trade, the small to medium family breweries.
Increasingly these seem to be heading the way of pubcos, demanding ever higher rental from tenants, which in straitened times is blind policy. Without going into details, I know at least one family brewery with a much-loved mid-sized pub estate which is forcing up rents in the face of a falling number of tenants. The old rule of thumb used to be that either: a) tenants paid a full market rate (when the market was better than it is now) and in return were allowed to buy all their supplies, sometimes including the brewery beer, on the open market, or b) tenants paid a low - peppercorn - rent in return for taking all their beer and almost all other products (soft drinks, wine, spirits) through the brewery supply line.
Now it seems the beancounters think they can maintain tied pubs' restrictions - which often means buying the brewery bitter at prices up to fifty percent above what they are available for to the free trade - while pushing up the rents.
The results of this are that being a pub landlord no longer looks attractive unless it becomes virtually a restaurant business, the only major profit area allowed. The inevitable corollary is that traditional drinking establishments, which is after all why breweries originally bought pubs as outlets for their produce, are failing. And that means the breweries sell less beer through their own outlets, and can be squeezed into standalone brewing businesses. That works for the micros, but for a mid-sized family business with good brands, it invites takeover (witness the recent fate of Sharp's swallowed by Coors). That can mean eventual closure. Perhaps this is what the midsized brewers want: a Sharps style £20m payday, but it puts an end to them as family businesses, and the onetime mainstay of British pub life.
Cynical or short-sighted? Take your pick.