Brewing in an office/place of work - Is it legal?

[calumscott]

Calling all lawers, barristers and high court judges, Do we have a home brewer in the house with a law degree?

Facinating topic and knowing the outcome, may have to consult my manager for the summer BBQ!

We don't need one.

If you refrain from selling your beer, or using it for a commercial purpose (i.e. in connection with your business [note: not your company but the business that it does]) then the revenue are not going to give a stuff where or with whom you drink it or who you give it to as a gift.

They actually have better things to do than bother with the likes of you and me and bringing very difficult and technical (read "expensive") test cases over the definition of "domestic use" when in reality all they'd get out of it is bad feeling and the duty on 40 pints of beer...

...can we all now just chill out and accept that if you don't flog it it's fine please???

 

[rpt]

I think we'll just have to disagree. You may well be right but I wouldn't want to risk prosecution. If too many people starting using home brew outside the home then HMRC may decide they are losing too much revenue and do something about it. I think they would find chasing home brewers much easier than the likes of Vodafone and Amazon.

 

[calumscott]

I think we'll just have to disagree. You may well be right but I wouldn't want to risk prosecution. If too many people starting using home brew outside the home then HMRC may decide they are losing too much revenue and do something about it. I think they would find chasing home brewers much easier than the likes of Vodafone and Amazon.

I can't see it myself. Remember each individual case would be a legal battle for nothing in terms of revenue and when the papers get hold of it, they would be hammered, then, if it was still on their agenda, it would have to be back to the House for a legislative approach which would, because it's an archaic right, be either buried or dismissed straight out of hand.

And as for popularity... CAMRA's Phil Lowry reckons (or reckoned) 15,000 brewers. However the article in the Guardian where I found that also says that muntons flogged 500,000 kits last year (doesn't mention that they were all UK and as we know Muntons sell worldwide). So let's triple it and round up. 50k brewers.

I can't find a statistic for population of 18+ ages but 15+ was 82.5% in 2011. So lets say 75% of the 63.2M, that's 47.4M people.

Homebrewers therefore make up roughly 0.1% of the drinking population.

We tend to be the more active end of the scale and in the space of a year and a half I've made 525l of beer. That works out at £60 worth of beer duty for the year (assuming that some of it was higher strength duty too).

Now consider that there is no way that they could ever suggest that any more than they have documentary evidence for could be presented as outside of domestic use... lets say one big brew - 40l... At current rates they'd be attempting to prosecute for £7.65...

How many of the 50,000 would ever find themselves in a grey area? A few hundred maybe? A couple of thousand? Each an individual case, with people working on it... for (on the part) a single brew... less than a tenner's worth of duty...

Even if all 50,000 had to pay duty on ALL of our beer (say 350l each a year) it would amount to less than £3.5M... pointless...

Utterly pointless...

 

[calumscott]

And that's at full rate too... Small brewery discount would clearly have to apply...