According to my findings (UK) for a 5% pint
Tax = 19.08p per percentage per litre
VAT is 20% and that also means VAT on the tax as well.
If anyone knows what taxes there are on American pints of the same strength. A US pint is 0.832674 of UK pint.
Don't forget progressive beer duty , or Small Brewer's Relief (SBR) to give it the official name, which halves duty for brewers producing less than 5,000hl and has a sliding scale up to 60,000hl, so most of the "cool" breweries are not paying 100% duty.
But they're in the middle of ripping up the duty system, although the main changes are to wine which is moving to a per-alcohol duty like beer, rather than per-volume as it is now. But eg the 7.5% tripwire will move to 8.5%, and there will be various changes to SBR.
A Deposit Return Scheme is
on its way in Scotland (although it's been put back to August 2023) and it's likely
something similar will be introduced in the rest of the UK, which is probably a bigger deal for small breweries than the duty changes.
US alcohol rules are a complete mess as you have two levels, federal and state, both of which can be somewhat...capricious. Remember that this is a country that completely banned all sale of alcohol at a national level within living memory, and still has "dry" counties where you can't buy alcohol. The Feds are so terrified of tied pubs that they mandate a three-tier system where all beer has to be sold to a distributor who then sells to retailers/bars. Most states now have some exemptions to that, but at its extreme it means a brewery has to sell beer to a distributor and then buy it off the distributor for sale in their own taproom at the brewery. Here's a bit of background to the 3-tier system :
Understanding the Three-Tier System and Its Impacts on Craft Beer
There's all sorts of craziness at state level, particularly in the more conservative states such as Utah where all alcohol over 5% ABV has to be sold through state-run liquor stores (and until 2019 the limit was just 4% ABV), until 2017 they insisted on "Zion curtains" to prevent restaurant patrons from seeing alcohol being prepared, and only officially legalised homebrewing in 2009. And historically there's been all sorts of restrictions on alcohol crossing state lines, although again those are easing.
The big difference in US beer taxation is that like with wine in the UK, it's done by volume not alcohol. Which is one reason US beer tends to be a bit stronger than here. Federal taxation has a size element like SBR, and varies from $3.50 to $18 per US beer barrel (31 US gallons, 117 litres). State taxation varies from $0.005 per litre (! = $0.59 per barrel) in Wyoming to $38.29 in Tennessee, then sales tax varies on top of that, from 0% in Delaware and Oregon to 9.75% in some parts of Tennessee (they have a state sales tax and a separate county sales tax). So...it gets complicated!!
