Selling craft beer to hotels with listings and payment terms

Check the route before the pitch

Before you approach any hotel, confirm that your beer can legally reach it. Many brewpub licences allow sale only on your own premises. Where a brewery can supply the trade, beer usually passes through a licensed wholesaler or distributor rather than going straight from your cold room to the hotel bar. Rules vary by state, so check the current position. If the legal route does not exist, no amount of tasting notes will fix it.

Understand where a hotel sits in your mix too. It is on-trade, with all the margin and service expectations that brings. Our guide to on-trade versus off-trade sets out the difference.

Who actually decides

In a large hotel the food and beverage manager usually owns the drinks list, with the bar manager and sometimes a group purchasing team involved. In a smaller boutique property the owner may decide over one tasting. Find out who signs the purchase order and who runs the bar day to day. Both matter. The first lists you. The second decides whether your beer is recommended or left in the fridge.

What hotels tend to ask for

Expect some version of these requests. Decide in advance which ones you will accept:

• Listing support. Some hotels ask for a listing fee, free stock for launch or a promotional budget. Put any such arrangement in writing and cost it against expected volume.
• Staff training. A short session for the bar team on each beer, how to pour it and what to pair it with. This one is worth offering before they ask.
• Consistent supply. A hotel cannot have its menu beer missing on a Saturday. Promise only what your fermenter schedule can deliver.
• Menu and event tie-ins. Beer dinners, brunch pairings or a seasonal special.

Payment terms and protecting your cash

Hotels typically pay on credit. Credit periods of a month or longer are common. For a small brewery that has already paid for malt, hops and often excise duty upfront, a long credit period means you are financing the hotel's bar.

Set terms clearly before the first delivery: the credit period, the invoice format the hotel's finance team needs, who to chase and what happens when payment is late. Small details matter. A missing purchase order number can push your invoice to the back of the queue for weeks.

Start with a modest order, watch how the first two invoices are paid and grow from there. If the account sits with a distributor, agree who carries the credit risk.

Keep a simple debtor list with the date each invoice is due and the date it is actually paid. Review it every week. The hotel that pays in 90 days when the agreement says 30 is not a good customer, however impressive the lobby.

Draught or packaged

Draught looks better on the bar and usually carries a better margin per litre. It also puts your beer on a draught system you do not maintain. A dirty line or a warm tower makes your beer taste of somebody else's neglect. If you supply kegs, agree who cleans the lines and how often. Then visit to check. Count your kegs going out and coming back, because a hotel storeroom is a good place for kegs to disappear.

Cans or bottles are easier to control and travel better through a hotel's cold chain. Many breweries start a hotel with a packaged core beer and add draught once the relationship and the line cleaning are proven.

Price it so the hotel can sell it

Work the price backwards. The hotel will apply its own margin, often a large one, before adding taxes. If your beer lands on the menu far above the international lager next to it, it will not move. Use a clear pricing method and test the menu price before you agree your ex-brewery price. Know the floor below which the account is not worth having.

Once listed, keep showing up. Visit the bar every few weeks, taste your beer from their tap, retrain new staff when the team changes and bring a seasonal beer for a menu feature. Hotel bar teams turn over often. The bartender who loved your beer at launch may have moved on by the third month.

Getting this right takes costing, credit control and negotiation skill together, which is a lot to learn mid-pitch. Our guide to beer distribution in India covers the wider channel picture.