Back in the day, the life of a brewer was rather regimented. Going back to the early ages of kettles boiling over crackling, smoldering logs as brewsters churned out beers as liquid sustenance for their Old World villages and townships, variety was not a concern. Like many of the world’s consumables, adherence to tried-and-true recipes is the basis of essentially every regional beer style in the world. But as with any artisanal practice, creativity crept in, with brewers trying their hand at new recipes, utilizing techniques observed elsewhere or dreamt up in their own brewhouses.
Fast forward to the twenty-first century, and the craft beer industry in the U.S. has revolutionized brewing. Brewers across the world—especially in the UK, Germany, Belgium, and the Czech Republic—began taking notice of American brewers’ creativity, particularly in styles like pale ales, lagers, stouts, and IPAs. The U.S. emerged as a new epicenter of brewing innovation, driven by a passion for variety and creativity.
As the craft beer movement grew, so did the demand for variety. Brewers no longer stuck to predictable core-beer production but began exploring new ingredients and techniques—such as barrel-aging, dry-hopping, and experimenting with different grains and yeast strains. This shift required brewers to stay innovative year-round, which in turn created a demand for advanced brewery management software.
In today’s fast-paced brewing environment, flexibility is key. Brewers need to be able to change plans on the fly without disrupting their production schedules or sacrificing quality. This is where brewery software like Beer30 and Bucha30 comes into play, offering brewers the flexibility they need while maintaining full traceability on costs, quality, and taste.
It’s hard to believe, but it was nearly a decade ago that the fruited-IPA trend bloomed. Grapefruit, blood-orange, tangerine, and mango-infused IPAs from that era remain some of the best-selling beers at retail and in brewery taprooms to this day. But the adjuncts abounding in these hop-driven ales went beyond citrus and tropical fruits (stone fruit, melons, berries) to spices (ginger, coriander, grains of paradise) and other agricultural products (coffee, cacao nibs, chili peppers). A cornucopia of ingredients lay at a brewer’s ready care of comprehensive supply groups, making for endless possibilities. A current cost-effective and on-trend practice is brewing a base kettle-sour ale, splitting the batch and adding different fruits to create a variety of flavor options to consumers.
Beer30's brewery management software allows for a base beer to be split into multiple tanks, where additional ingredients can be added. In FERMENT mode, brewers can rack equal (or different) amounts of, say, a Berliner weisse, into three tanks, then record fruit additions. And let’s say the original plan was to leave one fermenter unfruited, while adding cherries to one tank and raspberries to another… but on brew day, you discover a leftover box of all-natural blueberry purée left over from a previous beer and decide to split the beer into four tanks and make a fourth variation of that Berliner Weisse. Doing so will mean lessening the amount of the other two fruit additions as there will be less beer in the tank, but you’ve already entered the previously determined amounts into your brewing software. How difficult will it become to fix this change?! Well, with Beer30, it’s no problem. These split-batch beers can easily be annotated with fruit additions to make new flavored beers!
All it takes is a few keystrokes—entering the new amounts—for the program to update, in real-time, not only the quantities of the ingredients utilized but also other information such as remaining inventory and ingredient cost. The latter is particularly important as each adjunct has a different associated cost (e.g., pineapple is more expensive than, say, habanero peppers). Beer30's brewery software allows a company to factor in the cost of goods at every step in the process. Costs are appropriately allocated with each split using Beer30’s proprietary batch trace node algorithms so that projections and records are accurate to the penny! Similarly, tank volumes are tracked at every stage to ensure accurate yield projections.
Transfer options in Beer30 allow a brewer to have true flexibility while also maintaining proper traceability on costs, quality, and taste.
Beer30’s brewery software ensures precise cost tracking, not just for split-batching but also for merging tanks. In FILTER mode, brewers can blend variant batches of the same beer using PARTIAL FILTERS into a single UNI tank. Before merging, all cost and production data is readily available, giving you full insight into the process. This feature is particularly useful for merging potent fruited kettle-sours with portions of their unfruited base to create a smoother, more market-friendly final product. This can also be done in BBT mode, offering flexibility in production.
The benefits of Beer30’s brewery management software extend further, providing advanced tools for barrel-aged beers. For example, if you divide an imperial stout into multiple barrels—some bourbon, some brandy—and rest half of the beer on different confectionery-inspired ingredients to create a barrel-aged pastry stout, Beer30 allows you to track every detail. You can calculate costs and project outcomes before filling barrels and adding adjuncts during the aging process.
After a barrel-sampling session helps determine the ideal blend, Beer30’s brewery software can handle the complex calculations for secondary blends or leftover beer marked as a loss. This comprehensive approach to barrel aging, blending, and back-blending makes Beer30 an essential tool for managing the complexities of modern brewing operations.
Barrel Aging in Beer30 allows you to take quality notes, add ingredients and beers to barrels, and blend different barrels into tanks.
The science of Beer30 is the backbone of our spinoff interface, Bucha30. Launched in 2020, it quickly proved itself a valuable tool for hard-kombucha manufacturers. Its split-batch and merging features are particularly valuable to these operations, where adding multiple fruits to split batches of base products and combining them to create complex, balanced end products is even more prevalent than the brewing industry. This becomes increasingly complex in the real-world as kombucha brewers will brew multiple times into the same mother tanks and continuously split-batch into separate smaller tanks.
Whereas the majority of fruited and spiced beers incorporate one adjunct, hard kombuchas often include two or more to produce a uniquely flavorful offering capable of standing out from the competition on retail shelves. But no matter how many ingredients you throw at Bucha30 (or Beer30, for that matter), the software will generate accurate projections that brewers, owners, operations professionals and the accounting department can all count on as they strive for success in an increasingly competitive marketplace where every bit of fiscal discipline and planning matters.
Variations in Bucha30 incorporate all costs from the mother tank starter into multiple FVs / BBTs/ UNI tanks.
As with all things Beer30 and Bucha30, our simple user interface is the key. Brewing can feel like rocket science sometimes, but the tools your brewery relies on don’t need to.
Our systems allow a brewery to be fully flexible and make changes in real-time – meaning that if you need to adjust a tank’s contents or volume based on sales projections or forecasting, you can do it on the fly, which, let’s face it, has become a way of life for brewers in the modern era. But that’s OK, because we’ve got your back!
With our brewery management software, beer (and bucha) quality and overall efficiency are tracked on a batch-number-by-batch-number basis for easy traceability. For example, merging Batch 101 of a hazy triple IPA with Batch 102 of that same hazy IPA infused with strawberries will result in a new batch number: Batch 101+102, so there’s no guesswork as to the identity, composition or origins of that batch.
No brewery software is better equipped to provide what we can in this—and many other—areas. We’re understandably proud of what we’ve built and love talking about it. In fact, we’d love to talk about it with you. If you’re up for a conversation, fill out the contact page and we’ll send you more information about Beer30 or Bucha30.
Brandon Hernández is a contributing writer for The 5th Ingredient. He is an award-winning journalist and founder of San Diego Beer News LLC, an all-in-one online resource on San Diego’s craft-beer scene. Over the past 14 years, his brewing-industry reporting has been featured in dozens of national and regional magazines, newspapers and websites, as well as on television, radio and podcasts. He spent nearly a decade providing marketing services as an employee for high-profile craft breweries Stone Brewing, AleSmith Brewing and Societe Brewing, has authored and co-authored multiple books, and continues to provide freelance marketing services to companies in and around the beer industry. He can be reached via email
