That's called 'vertical integration' and was very normal for us up until the 1980s. In the 1980s we had a notorious piece of legislation commonly called The Beer Orders.
At the time we had six major brewers with pub estates and a national presence - plus dozens of smaller regional brewers - and for some stilll unfathomable reason this was perceived as a monopoly. In a move that looked bonkers at the time, and looks even more bonkers with the benefit of hindsight, the government of the day mandated that any brewer with a pub estate over 2000 sites must sell 50% of the pubs over and above that 2000.
There was no legislation around brewing though so there were all sorts of weird pub-for-brewery swaps, massive sales of packages going to brewery directors with the brewers lending them the money and then imposing a beer tie in return, massive packages going to property companies and an exercise in asset stripping like we've never seen before or since.
Of course, the business brains ran rings round the political brains and a lot of people made a lot of money. The upshot for us as a consuming public was that much of the tied house system disappeared and many of our older and much-revered brewers got gobbled up because the knobs in power didn't have the foresight to see it coming.
The pubs that went to property companies - Primarily Punch Taverns and Enterprise Inns - were operated on ruthless full repairing leases and dropped into a total monopoly situation where their landlord - a property company remember, not a brewere - became their sole supplier. That model literally ruined many, many lives and the court cases are still going on today.
At the same time, the CAMRA wankers were crowing about 'smashing the Big Six' and 'freeing 14,000 pubs from a beer tie' which was true in a literal sense but failed to note that those 14,000 pubs were now in the hands of property companies whic would be far, far worse as landlords than any brewer ever was.
This is the major reason why I despise CAMRA. There are others as well...
Fast forward a few years and the Beer Orders themselves were quietly repealed and acknowledged as 'a mistake'. This neatly opens the door for monopolies to exist without political interference. Genius.
Our volume brewing is now controlled by Heineken, Coors, ABInbev and Carlsberg. Carlsberg have just mopped up Marston's.
My blood boils still thinking about it. We had a brewer like Bass who produced great beers, had a pub estate of around 6000 which was largely debt free, and had been going about its business for a couple of hundred years just wiped out by clueless politicians and a trade union masquerading as a consumer group inside a decade.
There's a couple of books that touch on the subject, I can definitely reccomend this work of minor genius:
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