How a restaurant, hotel or pizzeria can pour craft beer on tap in Maharashtra without a brewery

The short answer

To pour craft beer on draught in Maharashtra you need two things. The first is a retail licence that lets you sell beer for drinking on your premises. The second is a licensed supplier who can move kegs to you with a valid transport pass. You do not need a brewery licence (Form BRL) for either.

Everything below is based on the State Excise department's own list of licence types and the published beer rules. Rules and fees change, often each financial year, so treat this as a map and confirm the details with your excise office or a licensing adviser. It is not legal advice.

The licences that let a venue pour beer

Maharashtra's rules treat beer as foreign liquor, so it sits inside the foreign liquor licences as well as its own. The ones that matter to an on-trade venue are these:

• FL-III: sale of imported and Indian-made foreign liquor at a restaurant or hotel, on which excise duty has been paid. This is the full permit room or hotel bar licence. Beer, spirits and wine all sit under it.
• FL-IV: the same kind of sale at a club, for members and their guests.
• Form E: sale of mild liquor (beer) on the premises of a hotel, restaurant, canteen or club. This is the beer licence for a venue that does not want to sell spirits.
• E-II: sale of wine on the same kinds of premises. A beer and wine restaurant usually pairs it with Form E.

For contrast, FL/BR-II is a beer shop licence for sealed bottles taken away. It is off-trade only, so it cannot run taps for drinking in. Our guide to on-trade and off-trade explains why that split shapes everything from pricing to pack size.

Which licence fits which venue

A hotel with a bar almost always needs FL-III, because guests will ask for whisky and gin as well as beer. Craft taps sit on the same licence as the spirits shelf.

A pizzeria, cafe or casual restaurant that only wants beer, perhaps with a short wine list, is the case Form E was written for. It is usually the simpler and cheaper licence to hold than FL-III, though the fee depends on where you are, because Maharashtra scales licence fees by the population of the area and revises them by gazette notification. Add E-II if you want wine.

A members' club uses FL-IV. If the club wants a beer-only bar, ask the excise office whether Form E for club premises suits it better.

Whichever you hold, the beer you pour must arrive duty paid, with a pass, from someone licensed to sell it to you. That is where most new tap programmes go wrong, so it gets its own guide below.

Where your kegs can come from

Three kinds of supplier can put craft beer on your bar legally:

• A commercial brewery with a Form BRL licence, whose beer normally reaches bars through an FL-I wholesale licensee.
• A contract-brewed brand: the recipe and the brand belong to one company, the beer is made at a licensed plant and the labels are registered under that plant's licence. To you it looks like any other brand from a wholesaler. Our contract brewing guide covers how those brands are built.
• A micro-brewery or restaurant-brewery under the rules as amended on 15 February 2024. Both are craft beer plants of up to fifteen lakh litres a year, and both may issue craft beer to holders of retail licences for on or off consumption.

A restaurant-brewery is the classic brewpub with tanks behind the bar. It sells on its own premises and, under the 2024 rules, may also supply licensed venues. Ask to see the supplier's licence before you plan a menu around its beer. Our guide to buying craft beer kegs in Maharashtra walks through the paperwork.

What the numbers look like

The licence is the smallest part of the cost. A four-tap set-up needs a cold room or keg fridge, a gas supply, a glycol or flash cooler in hot months and someone trained to change a keg without wasting the first litre. The beer itself carries Maharashtra's duty before it reaches you: 175% of declared cost (or ₹42 per bulk litre) for mild beer under 5% and 235% (or ₹80) for strong beer, as set out in our Maharashtra excise guide.

The margin lives in yield. A 30 litre keg poured at 330 ml should give about 90 glasses. Lose ten to foam, bad line cleaning and staff top-ups and your best seller quietly becomes your weakest earner. Few owners measure this until it hurts. Costing a tap list per glass, per keg and per month is the kind of work a spreadsheet can do and a gut feeling cannot.

Before you sign anything

• Get the licence in the right name for the right premises. A licence attaches to a place, so a move or a change of partners means paperwork.
• Ask the excise office which licence it will grant for your floor plan and seating. Ask too what it needs from you: fire, health and local body approvals vary by city.
• Ask every supplier which licensee will invoice you and how the transport pass will be raised.
• Check that each beer you plan to pour is registered as a keg label, not only as a can or bottle.

Then go back to the excise office and confirm anything that changed after this guide was written. Licence fees for the year are notified each spring. A licensing adviser who files in your district every month will know the current form numbers better than any website.