Beer Gas Supply: An Honest Update for Operators
10 August 2026
What is happening with your gas orders
If your gas order has moved more than once in the last few weeks, you are not imagining it and you are not being singled out.
Deliveries into us have been delayed and cancelled at short notice, sometimes on the day they were due. That has pushed orders back down the line to venues that were expecting them. We know exactly what that means when you are looking at a busy weekend with limited cover in the cellar, and we are sorry for it.
Rather than keep sending out dates that move, we would rather tell you plainly where things stand.
Why this is happening across the trade
This is not one supplier having a bad month. Food grade CO2 in the UK is mostly captured as a by-product of ammonia and fertiliser production. It is not made to order for the drinks trade. When those plants scale back, which they have done this year on the back of high gas prices and outages at European sites, the gas available to pubs, bars and hotels tightens at the same time for everyone.
It is a pattern the sector knows well, and government has said so in writing. Its call for evidence on CO2 supply chain resilience, published in June, states that the UK CO2 industry lacks resilience and has failed in 2018, 2021 and again in 2026, each time needing government intervention.
Why moving supplier is not the answer right now
The obvious response to a supplier letting you down is to go elsewhere. We have done exactly that on your behalf and approached multiple alternative gas suppliers to try to cover the shortfall.
None of them are in a position to help, and the government's own assessment explains why. Most of the CO2 used in the UK is now imported, domestic production contributes relatively little, and a small number of large distributors dominate the market. A different name on the cylinder does not change where the gas comes from.
We are still in the market and still asking. If that position changes, we will act on it straight away.
What to expect from us
So you can plan realistically rather than hopefully:
Gas orders are taking longer than usual, and confirmed dates can still move at short notice. Please treat any date as an estimate until the gas is physically with you.
We are not able to contact every account individually each time something changes upstream. If you have not heard from us, it means we are still chasing rather than that your order has been forgotten.
We are pushing our suppliers daily and escalating wherever there is a route to escalate.
There is plenty you can do in the meantime to stretch what you have on site, from cask and BIB cider through to switching the post mix off. We have put it all in one place: short on gas, five things that actually work.
One thing that would really help
If you have empty cylinders sitting in the cellar, the yard or the back of a store room, please get them back to us. Send them out with your next delivery or call and we will arrange collection.
Empties are the one part of this we can actually control. The more we have back in circulation, the more we can put in front of our suppliers to be filled the moment supply eases. Cylinders sitting unused in venues across the region are, in effect, gas that nobody can get to. Getting them moving now puts us in a far better position when the market loosens.
How Inn Express can help
If you are getting low, call us. Our team can tell you the true position on your order rather than an optimistic one, and talk through what we can and cannot commit to for your next trading week. That is a better use of your time than sitting on an order confirmation and hoping.
We would rather be the supplier that tells you straight than the one that keeps promising dates nobody can control. Thank you for your patience while we work through this.
