The stuff no one tells you about when you start a UK drinks brand

You’d think the hard part of launching a drinks brand would be the recipes. Turns out, the real headaches are all in the fine print. Licences, letters, checks, and lots on time on hold with HMRC.

First up: the Alcohol Wholesaler Registration Scheme (AWRS) licence. This basically lets you sell alcohol, wholesale. So, it’s essential if you want to supply pubs, bars, or wholesalers. Or even buy it in the first place. Lots of forms, explaining our strategy, running through our business plan, and an endless number of emails back and forth.

Plus, in-depth due diligence over suppliers. You need to vet every potential supplier – document checks, VAT verifications, trading terms. And document it in a formalised process and prove to HMRC that your suppliers are low-risk.

Next up: booze storage. You can’t just chuck it in a shed and crack on (we genuinely thought you might be able to do that). We needed a Warehousekeepers and Owners of Warehoused Goods Regulations (WOWGR) licence to keep alcohol in duty suspension. This is basically permission to hold our own product without paying the tax upfront – which is a lot. Getting it meant showing we knew exactly how and when we’d pay duty, how we’d track it, and that we weren’t just winging it…

Now try getting letters of intent when your product doesn’t exist. We needed suppliers to confirm they'd work with us (fine). But also needed pubs and venues to say they’d probably buy our drinks – not an easy feat when we didn’t even have a logo or website, let alone a finalised recipe.

Alongside that? A full business plan. A hard, number-heavy document detailing how we’d operate, grow, manage risk, and not go bust in year one.

And to top it off: hours of phone interviews. Weeks of back and forth playing call tennis.

Then, after months of uncertainty, approvals that came through just in time for our first production run.

We made it. Barely. But if anyone ever tells you starting a drinks brand is glamorous, feel free to laugh in their face.

We got there in the end, but not without a pile of forms and a crash course in UK alcohol law.