Duty settings

Breww keeps your duty configuration on a single settings page. The page is named after your duty regime, so depending on where you brew and which drink types you have set up, you may see it as Beer duty settings, Alcohol duty settings, Excise duty settings, TTB beer reporting settings or Accijns instellingen.

Because the page is built from your duty regime, not every brewery sees every section described below. Breww only shows the settings that apply to you.

Finding your duty settings

You can reach the page from several places:

• Go to Settings and click the [your duty name] settings button.
• From your duty dashboard, click Annual estimate & settings (UK) or Alcohol duty settings in the top right.
• If you report to the TTB, click Settings at the top of your list of Brewer's Reports of Operations.

Access to the page requires the Excise duty permission.

Production volumes

This section appears if your duty regime works out your rate from how much you produce. That covers UK alcohol duty (Small Producer Relief), US TTB reporting (CBMA rates), German Biersteuer (Staffelsteuersätze) and Dutch bieraccijns. Regimes that do not use production totals, such as Australian and New Zealand excise duty, do not show this section at all.

Breww asks for two figures for the current production year:

• Actual production volume for last year - what you actually produced in the previous production year. Breww shows you the total it has recorded under your licence as a guide, but you can enter a different figure if your own records differ. If you started production part way through that year, enter what you would have produced had you been running for the whole year.
• Production estimate for this year - what you expect to produce across the current production year.

Both figures are needed. Together they decide which duty rate band you fall into.

What counts as a "year" depends on your regime

For UK alcohol duty the production year runs from 1 February to 31 January, and the figures asked for are alcohol production totals (in other words, hectolitres of pure alcohol) for products above 1.2% ABV. For US TTB, German and Dutch reporting the production year is the calendar year, and the figures are beer production volumes.

The dates of the period you are entering figures for are always shown in the field's label, so you never have to work them out yourself.

Entering next year's figures early

Shortly before your production year rolls over, Breww adds a Next year group to this section so you can get ahead. This appears six weeks before the change for UK alcohol duty, and two weeks before for the other regimes. The rest of the year, only the current year's fields are shown.

Both next-year fields are optional, but you must either fill in both or leave both blank. Entering them means Breww will not need to prompt you when the new year starts.

If you have more than one duty regime

If your drink types use more than one duty regime (for example, beer and cider), you will see a separate set of production volume fields for each one, each labelled with the regime it belongs to.

Historical annual estimates

Breww also needs production figures for past years if you still hold stock produced in them, because for UK Small Producer Relief the rate is fixed at the point of production rather than at the duty point. If you moved to Breww partway through, those older years may be missing.

Click Historical annual estimates in the top right of the duty settings page to see every estimate Breww holds, then click Add estimate to add one for a past period. If you use more than one duty regime, choose which regime the estimate is for.

If you are seeing an error when dispatching older stock, see Missing production estimate error?.

What changes when you update a production volume

Changing a production volume changes the duty rate Breww applies, so on save Breww will:

• Recalculate any duty return that is still in progress. Returns that have been completed or marked as paid are left untouched.
• Requeue a recalculation of the nominal duty amounts held against your products, which is what drives duty-inclusive pricing and cost figures. This runs in the background and takes a few moments.

HMRC information

UK breweries get an HMRC information section for storing the identifiers you need when submitting a return: your brewer's account number, beer duty reference number, APPA ID and VAT number. These are recorded separately for each producing entity (duty group) and appear on the relevant duty return, purely for your own reference. Breww never sends them to HMRC on your behalf.

For a full walkthrough, see Entering your HMRC details.

Options for your duty regime

Any settings that are specific to your duty regime appear in their own section, named after the regime (for example Beer duty options or TTB beer reporting options).

UK alcohol duty options

Apply draught relief by default, if applicable. When enabled, Breww applies draught duty relief to eligible products by default. This is enabled unless you turn it off. It is only a default: you can override it for a whole customer type, and again on an individual invoice item, so a single order can be handled differently without changing this setting. Eligibility itself is still decided by Breww from the product's ABV and container type, so turning this on will never apply relief to something that does not qualify.

Treat stock duty-paid before August 2023 as Draught relief eligible. This is disabled by default and we recommend leaving it that way. Breww normally blocks dispatch of an order that needs draught relief when the stock assigned to it was duty-paid under the pre-August-2023 regime, because that stock does not qualify. Enabling this setting only bypasses that check. It does not apply draught relief to the stock, and it means non-draught-relief stock can be sold without the information on the invoice that lets your customer sell it for takeaway.

TTB beer reporting options

Which date should Breww use as the transaction date on TTB entries? Choose between:

• Added to Breww date (the default) - the date you actually performed the action in Breww.
• Action date - the date you entered on the action itself as the "Date & time done".

Changing this does not affect entries that have already been created. If you pick Action date and later enter an action dated inside a period whose BROP has already been finalised, that entry appears on the next available period instead.

Customers to treat as a "Tavern on brewery premises" and Parent companies to treat as a "Tavern on brewery premises". Sales to the customers you select here (or to any customer under a parent company you select) are categorised on your Brewer's Report of Operations as a sale to a tavern on brewery premises. Use the parent company option if your taproom trades through several linked customer records.

Default ABV calculation for duty purposes

Duty is worked out from the ABV of what you sell, and Breww lets you choose where that ABV comes from. You get one setting per drink type, so beer and cider can use different methods:

• Advertised ABV entered on the drink - uses the ABV recorded on the drink itself.
• Automatically calculated from fermentation readings - uses the ABV worked out for each batch from its starting and final gravity readings.
• Entered manually - you type the ABV in on each batch.

Not every regime offers all three. US TTB reporting only allows the advertised ABV, so no question is shown for TTB drink types.

This is only a default. It is copied onto each batch as the batch is created, and can be changed on an individual batch afterwards. Changing the setting here does not alter batches that already exist. Once a batch has duty entries against it, only users with the Brewery admin permission can change its ABV or ABV calculation method.

Derived at packaging ABV settings

A derived-at-packaging drink is one created at the point of packaging from another batch, such as a dry-hopped or blended version. Breww needs to know whether duty should use the derived drink's own ABV or the ABV of the batch it came from, and this setting sets the default:

• Use the beer's ABV (the default) - the advertised ABV on the derived drink record.
• Use the batch's ABV - the ABV of the underlying batch.

This section is shown for UK alcohol duty, German, Dutch, Australian and New Zealand regimes. As with the ABV calculation method, the choice is recorded on each batch when the batch is created, so changing it here affects new batches only and existing batches keep the value they were created with.

For more on derived drinks, see Alias, derived & guest beers.

Saving your settings

Click Save settings at the bottom of the page. Breww confirms with a message at the top of the screen and, where relevant, kicks off the recalculations described above under What changes when you update a production volume.