Equipment · 7 min read · 14 September 2026

Kegs and kombucha on tap: what changes when you sell to the on-trade

A bottle leaves your brewery finished. A keg leaves unfinished, in a container you still own, to be poured through equipment you do not control. On tap is a distribution channel, not a package size, and it changes your equipment, your paperwork and your balance sheet.

In Europe a large share of kombucha reaches drinkers through bars, cafés and restaurants rather than off a shelf, which makes the on-trade one of the more realistic growth channels for a small producer. One venue on tap is recurring volume with a single delivery point, instead of hundreds of bottles moving through a distributor. The catch is that you are handing the last step of your process to somebody else. This guide is about what you have to get right before you do.

You give up control at the moment of pour

Everything a customer tastes passes through the venue's lines, the venue's gas, the venue's cleaning schedule and the venue's cellar temperature. None of that is yours, and all of it is attributed to you. A beer-trained venue will treat your product like a beer, which is mostly fine and occasionally wrong in ways that matter.

The practical consequence is that a keg account is a relationship, not a delivery. The venues worth having are the ones that keep a cold cellar and clean their lines on a schedule. The ones that do not will make your product taste like a problem you cannot see from your brewery.

The keg is an asset, not packaging

A bottle goes out and is gone from your books. A keg goes out, costs real money, and has to come back. That single difference creates most of the administrative work.

Your fleet is sized by turn time, not by weekly volume. If a keg spends four weeks at a venue and one week being cleaned and refilled, every tap you supply ties up several kegs permanently. Work out the round trip before you quote a second account.
Deposits make the money work, and the tracking is still yours. A deposit gives the venue a reason to return the keg. It does not tell you which kegs are where, how long they have been out, or which ones quietly never came back. That is your record to keep.
Mark them and count them. Know your fleet, know how many are at customers right now, and know the oldest one out. Kegs disappear slowly and invisibly, a couple a year, until a stocktake finds the gap.
A deposit is not sales revenue. It is money you are holding against a returnable container, and it should not be sitting in your turnover. Agree the treatment with your accountant before the first invoice rather than unpicking it later.

Filling a live product into a sealed pressure vessel

Kombucha keeps fermenting after you seal it, and a keg hides that better than a bottle does. Nobody sees a keg bulge. The pressure just goes up.

Residual sugar is the fuel. The more you leave, the more the keg will build over the weeks it sits in a cellar. Finishing the ferment further is the most reliable control you have.
Cold chain is the brake. Cold from your filler to their cellar, with no warm stretch in a van on a Friday afternoon.
Purge the headspace. Filling into a keg full of air costs you shelf life and flavour. Counter-pressure filling and a proper purge are worth the extra step for a product that lives.
Alcohol drifts in the dark. A keg sitting warm for weeks is exactly the shelf-life scenario the alcohol guide describes, in a format where nothing visibly warns you. If you label the product as non-alcoholic, your shelf-life evidence has to cover kegs, not only bottles.

What the venue needs from you before the first delivery

Most on-tap problems are agreement problems, and they are cheap to prevent.

Confirm the coupler. Keg fittings are not universal. Ask what the venue has and match it rather than assuming, because a keg that will not connect is a wasted delivery and a bad first impression.
Agree the gas. Carbon dioxide is the normal choice. The venue's setup was built for beer, so the pressure it is running may not be the pressure your product wants.
Put line cleaning in writing. Your product is sugary and alive, which is harder on a line than beer is. At minimum it should be on the venue's normal cleaning schedule, and you should know what that schedule actually is rather than what it is supposed to be.
Say what temperature it is poured at, because a warm line spoils a live product faster than it spoils beer.
Give them one page. What it is, the alcohol content, how to store it, pour temperature, line cleaning, and how long it is good once tapped. Venue staff turn over. A page in the cellar survives the person you explained it to.

The paperwork a keg account adds

None of this is new in kind. It is the same traceability and sales work you already do, applied to a container that comes back.

A keg carries a lot. Which batch went into which keg, and which keg went to which venue. If you have to recall, a keg is one line to a known address, which is the easiest recall you will ever run, but only if you wrote it down.
Delivery notes carry returns. The same document that delivers full kegs takes empties back, so the count reconciles in one place instead of two.
Deposits appear on the invoice and have to be visible as deposits, both for the venue's sake and for yours.
Your asset register knows where the fleet is. Kegs at customers are yours, in someone else's cellar, and they belong in the count.

When on tap is worth it, and when it is not

The arithmetic is fleet cost plus the deposit float plus turn time, against the volume the account actually pulls.

It works with a steady venue that has a cold cellar, staff who clean lines, and enough throughput that a keg does not sit for two months. It does not work for one-off events, for venues that will not commit to cleaning, or for a fleet you cannot afford to have standing in other people's buildings. Two good accounts beat six that each hold a keg hostage, and the second kind is how a small producer ends up with no kegs and no idea where they went.

Frequently asked questions

How many kegs do I need per tap?

Work it from turn time rather than volume. Count the days a keg spends at the venue, in transit, waiting to be cleaned, and being refilled, then divide that round trip by how often the venue empties one. The answer is usually more than producers expect, and it is the number that decides whether a second account is affordable yet.

Can I use one-way kegs instead?

For events and for distant one-off accounts they solve a real problem: nothing to chase, no deposit, no return leg. You pay for that per fill rather than once, and you give up the reusable asset. Many producers run stainless for regular accounts and keep a few one-way kegs for festivals and trials, which is a reasonable split rather than a compromise.

Does kombucha need different lines from beer?

The hardware is usually the same hardware. What changes is how much the cleaning matters, because a sugary live product is more forgiving of nothing and less forgiving of a skipped schedule. Confirm with the venue what their lines are made of and how often they are actually cleaned, and treat a vague answer about the schedule as the answer.

BrauMo treats kegs as what they are: stock and asset at once. Which batch filled which keg, which venue has it, how long it has been out, the deposit on the delivery note and the invoice, and the empties coming back on the same document. Documentation-only: it records and reports, it never blocks a batch. See kegs, deposits and deliveries in the product tour →

Kegs and kombucha on tap: what changes when you sell to the on-trade

You give up control at the moment of pour

The keg is an asset, not packaging

Filling a live product into a sealed pressure vessel

What the venue needs from you before the first delivery

The paperwork a keg account adds

When on tap is worth it, and when it is not

Frequently asked questions

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