Talking of free houses: The UK pub sector has, since the 1980s, been complicated by the arrival of the pub chain or 'pubco'.

The UK government introduced new laws (known as the "Beer Orders") in the late 1980s to try to counteract the then oligopoly of the handful of large brewers that controlled the vast majority of UK pubs. The laws included limits on how many pubs a brewer could own. The idea was to try to free up the market, especially in areas of the country where a large brewer had a virtual monopoly, because they had gradually bought out all the competitors in the area.

Some of the large brewers did the decent thing and sold off pubs above the limit to smaller companies, while others cynically swapped pubs for breweries, so that Company A took over Company B's breweries, in exchange for Co. A's pubs - so we had a huge brewery with no pubs, and a huge pub company with no breweries of its own. Neither co. was breaking the new law. Of course, they had also agreed as part of the deal that "Brewco" would exclusively supply "Pubco's" pubs with beer. This was something the govt hadn't anticipated (perhaps short-sightedly, with the benefit of hindsight).

Then during the 1990s, some of the old breweries sold off their pubs to third parties (including Japanese banks and the like) to form new 'pubcos' - pub owning companies.

These pubs in theory were 'free houses' in that they weren't tied to any brewery. But being so large, they are able to exert strong pressure on breweries to supply them with beer at low prices. They then supply their supposedly 'free' pubs with these ales. Any brewery not on the approved list can't sell their beers in the chain's pubs. Smaller breweries in particular can't afford to supply the beers to the chains at the low prices they demand. At least one brewery (Brakspear) went bust by trying to undercut their competitors in this way (the company was later taken over and saved, after a fashion).

These pubco companies have been gradually acquiring more pubs, or taking over smaller chains, with the result that the genuine free houses (those without any tie to any other company) have almost disappeared. There are a small number of large chains that now own most of the country's pubs - not a lot different from the bad old days in many ways.

So, there are two types of free house: the genuinely free house, perhaps owned by the landlord, who is free to choose what beer he sells; and the 'pubco' free house, that can't.

Whenever I can, I try to support the 'real' free houses - I'd liek to see the law changed to prevent chains from calling their pubs free houses, but I haven't seen much interest from CAMRA in doing this.