Mark Daniels: Brand new customers only...

I've always been quite careful not to be too disparaging about the beer tie. Sure, it is galling to have to pay almost £45 for a 7-litre box of Postmix when I can pick the same thing up from a cash & carry for a whisker under thirty quid. And yes, some of the differences are even wider when it comes to alcoholic products. On the flip-side, however, coming in as a tenant was a much more affordable way to get my own business up and running than buying myself a free house and certain other aspects, such as cellar maintenance, are included in the package.

And, as my contacts at my brewery - not to mention one or two customers - are fond of telling me, I knew what I was getting myself in to on the day that I signed my contract, so I can't start bitching about the prices now that business has got tight. There's no such thing as compassion when it comes to contracts.

This is one of the reasons behind why I have always viewed my tenancy as little more than a franchise. As I've mentioned before, I wouldn't expect to buy a McDonald's franchise and then be allowed to buy my burgers from Burger King, so I don't expect my landlords to let me buy my beer from a rival brewer.

Or should I? One of the biggest problems I do have with the beer tie isn't so much the prices themselves, pricey as they are, but the restriction on products available. I can't have Carlsberg because it isn't on my buy list, so my darts team - which comprises nine lager drinkers - do not drink in my pub other than on days when they have a darts match here, because a pub in a neighbouring village just a few minutes away has the product on draught. I've got a proven case of other people using rival pubs because they like drinking Carlsberg, and all have said they would use my pub more often if they could get what they want to drink.

In a time when business is tough and competition is rife, you'd think that such products - especially when the same distribution centre does indeed send out kegs of Carlsberg to the free trade - would be more readily available. But they're not and, with one thing and another, pubs are continuing to close. Like the one a couple of villages away from me, where the landlords only went in six months ago. That's already up for tenancy again, only this time the cost of going in is incredibly cheap. And the rent is extremely low.

And, even on a tenancy with the same brewery as I'm tied to, it has a big promotional offer: "free of tie option available."

Ringing up my contact to find out whether there is a chance I could also have this option, the answer came back a resounding "no". It would seem that the breweries are struggling to get people to agree to come in to the pub business at a time when the on-trade is on its knees, and so they are having to do what they can to attract new tenants. The list of pubs with similarly attractive options for new business seekers is long - I can think of a fistful of pubs around here, all up for tenancy, many with offers freeing them of certain aspects of the tie and low rents to make the first few years easy.

Existing tenants, however, who don't want to lose their businesses and are simply looking for a bit of release from the financial pressures we're under, don't seem to be as important to the breweries. "You have to realise," I was told, "that even if we did give you an option to be free of certain parts of your tie, your rent would go up to compensate us for it." Unlike the new tenants, it seems that I - and other tenants like me - are going to continue to get screwed; if I didn't love my pub so much it would be tempting to hand in my notice and take out one of the new contracts.

It almost reminds me of the big oaf of a bank manager in the Nationwide adverts... "brand new customers only."