Nothing starts the yawns and glazed-eyes like the subject of brewery management software, but stay awake because you need it. You really need it. Velo Mitrovich reports

IIn the 1999 movie ‘The Mummy’, Evelyn sees her map to the ancient Egyptian city of Hamunaptra burn – no map, no journey, no archaeology find. But adventurer Rick O’Connell taps his head, gives an all-knowing look, and tells her: “I’m your map.”

As a museum librarian and curator, Evelyn likes organisation, she likes taking chaos and turning it into order. O’Connell, on-the-other-hand, is walking chaos. Everything he does, he does it by the seat of his pants.

Even if we are secretly envious of Evelyn’s skills, with pride we say we’re like O’Connell. Brewing schedules, beer recipes, supplies and accounts, they’re all up here, we say with a tap to the head. That could be brewing by the seat of our pants and scribbles on the back of envelopes – lots of envelopes. 

While even in the best of times that isn’t the best way to run a brewery, now as the industry tries to recover after the Covid-19 pandemic and with breweries trying to re-establish their place in this brave new beer, you need to organise your operation like never before.

Not to worry though – there is a tool to do this, which will become so ingrained in your brewery’s operation, you’ll be wondering how you ever operated without it. And the brilliant thing is, you don’t have to be a big or medium brewer to take advantage of it.

If for some reason you’re not already using a brewery software management programme, if you think too much time will be wasted learning how to use it, or you’re not happy with the one you do have – which you barely use – read on.

You need to treat the software like you’re hiring an employee, because if handled correctly, that’s exactly what the programme will become for you. 

When you need a new employee, you weed through the applications and narrow it down to three or four. You ask around, see who else has worked with them, and decide whether or not they’ll fit into the team.

It’s pretty much the same in choosing a brewery management system. And again, like with an employee, if they’re not working out, you let them go and try someone else.

With almost all, you can get 30-day free trial and again, with most, there is no contract that locks in you for 18-months.

But which system is best – that’s a question only you can answer. Taking in all UK, USA, Canadian and Australian brewery software management programmes out there, there are easily 120 or more and if you’re like most of us, a week doesn’t go by without getting an email from the latest entry into the field. 

Some claim to do everything but walk the brewery dog, while others specialise in just one or two aspects such as keeping track of kegs and barrels.

In this report, we’ll be talking to Sam Williams of BrewMan (Premier Systems Ltd), Max Andrew of Breww, and Lesley Page of BrewPlanner, a US-based company with UK brewing clients.

All of these software packages have been designed to accomplish the same thing – to help your brewery run more efficiently and to help you make more money with some variances. But. In what will be repeated numerous times here, you need to find the system that works best for you. 

Pandemic drives need

When the Covid-19 pandemic started shutting down businesses in March 2020, few of us had any idea how long restrictions would last.

With taprooms closing, along with pubs and restaurants, the majority of craft brewers had to start changing significantly how they did business.

For those thinking that selling to supermarkets would be their way out of a bad situation, they were in for a rude awakening when they realised just how small a supermarket shelf is when everyone else is fighting for the same space.

“The main thing of course that that happened in in March was a lot of breweries suddenly had to change their business model, from selling a little bit of direct-to-consumer to pretty much all direct-to-consumer,” says Max Andrew of Breww.

This required breweries to suddenly take their websites a lot more seriously as this became one of the main sources of customer interaction, along with Facebook and other social media sites. The end result of this was the opening up more sales channels than ever before.

While this might sound great, the reality was far different. And, if this alone was causing confusion, staff changes were also taking place with those who could, started working from home. 

“Suddenly, the salesperson on phone, being able to go out and have a look in the cold room to see what was in stock, wasn’t really an option anymore,” says Andrew. While before all sales were over the phone, now they started coming from all the other platforms.

“Breweries needed something to tie everything to together – they couldn’t afford to have the person handling web sales and the person handling phone sales not knowing what was in stock at the brewery.

The brewery staff, too, needed to know production demands, what beers were suddenly trending, and what supplies to order.

During the best of times when everyone was working at the same location, any of these steps could easily fall through the cracks. But now this was far from being the best of times.

Sam Williams of BrewMan said that a few years ago they offered a direct-to-consumer option, but for the most part there wasn’t much interest.

Then one brewery customer asked if they could do an integration with the B2C (business to customer) platform Shopify. Again, BrewMan did it, but as Williams admits: “The take-up was very, very small.”

Although there were already a wealth of pre-pandemic online bottle shops, some being niche, for example, specialising in low-to-no alcohol beers. But, it’s hard thinking of a single brewery that was using B2C as their main business stream.

But then the pandemic hit and as Lesley Page of BrewPlanner says: “It forced everyone to up their game.”

Across the board, nothing was easy and brewers turned to software to see what could make their lives easier in this complicated time.

“Suddenly, all of our customers realized that we had this direct-to-consumer integration ready-to-go and they absolutely needed it.

“Because without it, if you had a separate website, you have to make the orders twice, you have to track the stock twice – it’s just an inordinate amount of work to have multiple different systems in different places,” says Williams.

While before a brewery might have only several major customers in a day – a pub, restaurant, supermarket or bottle shop – now they were being inundated with 100 small customers, all with individual orders.

“How the hell are you managing that stock on a spreadsheet, it’s just become an absolute nightmare,” says Williams. “People turned to software to see how they could alleviate this problem.”   

The need & want

While the pandemic fuelled the need for craft breweries to change out they ran their business, it was always there, especially as growth started. 

“Most brewers don’t go into the industry because they love entering data,” says Page, “but we all get to the point where whiteboards and little sheets of paper don’t cut it anymore.

“Brewers are looking for software that can meet their needs, while not detracting or taking away from what they love to do, which is to make great beer.”

“Most brewers don’t go into the industry because they love entering data,” – Lesley Page, BrewPlanner

“I’m speaking for multiple software companies out there, the primary goal of brewery management software is to make things easier than you’re already doing, which as you know, is saving yourself time on tasks that aren’t necessarily complicated, but are just time drains,” says Williams, and in thoughts echoed by Andrew and Page.

“So depending on the business, that might be calculating how much duty you owe in a couple of minutes instead of taking days. It might be telling you where all your casks are, so you’re not chasing up people to find out where they are and costing a lot of money not getting them back. 

“It could also be you’re going for SALSA accreditation [Food Certification Scheme: Safe & Local Supplies Approval], and you want to find out exactly which batch of ingredients you ordered six months ago, and which batches of beer that went into which containers, that then went to who you sold them to, so you can prove you can do a recall without producing 20 different spreadsheets and pieces of paper. So, it’s a lot of different functions. 

“Every single thing is designed to make something what you have to do regularly, a little bit easier and quicker, to allow you to focus on making great products and growing your business, rather than dealing with admin,” says Williams.

Time element

We all know brewers who have bought expensive test kits, but then only use it for one function. Why? They don’t have time to learn the other 29. 

You’ve decided to try a management software, but when you realise the amount of data you’re going to have to initially enter, suddenly, that white board doesn’t seem like such a bad idea.

“I think we probably all run into that in all areas of our lives. I know it would save me a lot of time, but I don’t have the time to save time,” says Page. “It sounds ironic.

“With any software there’s always that upfront to get all the data into the system and all of that. But ideally, once it’s up and running, then it’s just kind of fluid and can be incorporated easily into the duties that the user is already completing.”

Traditionally, a lot of systems were designed for mid-size breweries and unless you were brewing X-amount, it was pointless even looking at one. But, according to Williams, in the last few years management software can now apply to even micro-breweries.

“If your biggest worry is costs, plans are usually based around the number of people using it and the amount of beer produced. One-man-bands pay very little until they start scaling up,” he says.

“A good software package will help you with efficiency and I would say that’s not something that should be reserved as luxury for the medium to big players,” says Andrew. One of the huge advantages of the software package is data collection and data analysis, and providing you with actual insights into data.

“The more data you have, the better those insights will be. So starting with from day one, collecting that information, storing that information and receiving the benefits of that information is going to be hugely helpful,” he says. “So I would say it’s for everyone, and small, medium and big.”

Page takes the view even further and believes a good software package can be of a huge use before the first beer is produced. 

“Ideally with smaller, the earlier you start the better because that reduces the complexity of onboarding and getting everything set up,” she says.

“If you can get the whole crew on board with using a certain system, that will increase efficiency and improve communication among all players on the team from the get-go,” she says. 

“Then it’s just going to make those growing pains less and make it easier for a kind of a fluid transition to growing into producing more beer styles or expanding into different accounts. Whatever it is, wherever the growth is happening, starting earlier will definitely make that just a much smoother transition.”

Using it

If you find your management software to not be user friendly, that it feels too cumbersome to learn, and it seems to only be making extra work, you’re not going to enter the data or after you do initially, you won’t continue to do so. You need to find a system that works for you.

“I think some software was designed with one certain player in mind, whether it’s the accountant or the brewer or the salesperson, it then becomes pretty obvious who it wasn’t designed for,” says Page.

“We also have different ways of thinking and different ways of organising our thoughts so you need to find one that makes sense to you and sense to your whole team.”

“When it comes down to it, there will be a couple of software packages that fit what you’re looking for. And there are so many possibilities that a single software package could do for you that you might have a very specific way of working that only one of them actually does exactly what you needed to do, and therefore that’s the one you’re going to go with,” says Williams. 

According to Andrew, if you get the right software package, it should have elements for every type of thinker.

“Lots of people just want raw data. They want data thrown at them, they want to look at it, and they just want reams and reams of data so they can analyse it themselves.

“Other people are more visual thinkers. They want to see graphs, trends. They don’t want sort of the raw data as itself, they want to be told all the things from that data that is useful. ‘I don’t have time to analyse all this raw data myself, just give me the answers that I’m looking for’. I would say the right software package should cater for, for both those type of thinkers. 

“I mean, even just automating the tasks of the day that that software packages should be able to do, automating your taxes and duties, automating updating your web shops, updating your trade, and collating all the information and sales information has you go.

“Just the time that you save from having a software package installed, is going to make it be the cheapest employee you’ve ever had.”

Premier’s cloud-based brewery management software BrewMan is an industry standard in the UK, used by over 200 businesses.

If you want a system that does everything, then look no further. Its modular system covers processes from end-to-end, including duty calculation, ensuring full production traceability, stock control, distribution and cask tracking.

“The thing that we’re proud of is we’ve actually been around for about 20 years. And through that time, we have be absolutely focused on UK brewers and distillers,” says Williams.

“So the features that have been built into our system are based on their feedback, because they’re the experts in Britain, they know what they need.

“In the same way when you’re hiring someone, people ask around the brewing industry – it’s one of the most friendly industries I’ve ever encountered, the amount that people just willing to help each other,” says Williams. 

“It’s a collaborative, rather than a competitive marketplace. Many people call us up and say, ‘You know I heard from my friend at this brewery that they use BrewMan I’m really interested in finding out more.’ I don’t think I could ever expected such organic word of mouth, from any other kind of industry, it’s real. It really shows what a collaborative experience brewing is,” he says.

“The right software should allow you not to spend a lot of time on that software”– Max Andrew, Breww

BrewPlanner was created by Daniel Page who in 1999 became the brew master at Beagle Brewery, the southernmost brewery in the world, located on the island of Tierra del Fuego.
For the last 13-years he’s been the brew master and co-founder of Colorado’s Upslope Brewing Company. He was frustrated with existing management software systems so he created his own.

“We are brewer developed, with Danny constantly looking to ways to make things can be better,” says Lesley Page.

“I think all too often in all industries, people try to come up with solutions when they’re not totally in touch with what it’s like to be on the front lines and floor. Danny is still a brewer in the industry and getting feedback from his crew and from other brewers.”

According to Page, what sets BrewPlanner apart is that it’s a visual, virtual-kind of simplified representation of what’s happening in your brewery, giving you want you need, and not all the bells and whistles which nobody ever uses. This lets the brewer focus on brewing and making the schedule, instead of getting hung up in data and spreadsheets.

She says that it looks simple because all it takes is a quick glance to see what is happening, but just a click away is all the data if needed.

‘The cheapest employee you’ve ever had’

Useability and intuitive

From the start of the Breww journey, Max Andrew says they wanted to create a brewery software system which was cloud-based, letting you use it on your phone, table, PC or Mac with never a barrier stopping you from accessing your data. And, just as important, making it as intuitive as possible so it’s a tool for the brewer, and not the opposite.

What many like about Breww is the number of existing packages out there, such as for ecommerce, accountancy, point-of-sale and marketing, that integrate easily into Breww.

“The way that the integrations work is your pricing, stock and products can be managed on your management system that can update your website,” says Andrew. 

“Orders are placed on the website by an individual consumer. These then flow through to management system where stock is assigned to those orders – this way you don’t accidentally go out stock and selling things that you can’t sell. 

“Those orders then flow into your distribution, along with your trade orders what needs to go out today, then to a courier and out. Then all of those orders can pass across to your accounting software that you also have, so those sales are being tracked as well. It’s kind of an ecosystem of different software pieces working together,” he says.