For many brewers, changing brewery software or switching to brewery software from spreadsheets may feel like an unnecessary headache. After all, many breweries can function on a solid combination of spreadsheets and whiteboards. However, what brewers might not realize is that relying on other software companies or traditional methods like spreadsheets for organization and data calculation can be more than just a hassle—it might actually end up costing more in the long run. When you add together the costs of labor, production, and missed growth opportunities, your potential profits could be suffering.
In today’s industry, tracking Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) accurately and maximizing a brewery’s efficiency is more important than ever. Beer30 offers one of the most powerful COGS reporting functions in the industry, allowing you to track costs at a granular level. Beer30 is different from other software in the industry because it accounts for raw material and packaging material price fluctuations from batch to batch, while incorporating the price changes that occur due to split batches, merges, and ingredient substitutions and additions. Beer30 also incorporates beer losses during fermentation, filtration, conditioning, and packaging into your final COGS breakdown for each batch, so you have an accurate understanding of how your efficiency impacts your costs. Tying in revenue from sales reports helps breweries understand margins across their different channels in retail, wholesale, and now taprooms thanks to our new integration with Square POS.
But hey, don’t take our word for it, check out case studies from some real Beer30 customers. Here we take a look at Your Mates, Frog Alley, and Pelican Brewing and see how they’ve used Beer30 by The 5th Ingredient® to cut down on labor and save thousands.
Starting out, Your Mates was just a couple of guys brewing beer and trying to run a business in Warana, Australia, in the Sunshine Coast. Originally, they “had no idea how to do so,” says Christen McGarry, cofounder and COO/CFO. There were many roadblocks on their journey, and the team had to figure things out as they went along.
Like many breweries, Your Mates struggled with keeping everything organized. The team was looking for software that could help them organize their inventory, manage their scheduling, and utilize their data to accurately forecast their needs for raw materials.
Using Beer30, Your Mates was able to onboard and get it running in just 24 hours, organizing everything under a single platform. The team was able to consolidate most of their operations to manage them easily, reduce their labor costs, and improve efficiency by a jaw-dropping margin—about $100,000 (AUD) per year.
“With cost savings and time,” McGarry says, “you’d have to employ another person who was experienced in inventory management, scheduling, and materials resource planning—someone who could build a database that could give you the information that Beer30 is giving you. That’s a $100,000 salary, I’d say.”
For Your Mates, the Material Resource Planning (MRP) module was vital. “We just couldn’t live without MRP making sure that we have a forward forecast of the materials that we’re going to need,” McGarry says. “You know, we’ve had tens of thousands of liters of beer held up in tanks before because someone didn’t realize we were almost out of four-pack barcodes—because we didn’t have a really strong system to forecast when we would run out of materials, and when we would need materials a whole production facility would just be at a standstill.”
As Your Mates continues to grow, Beer30 has become an important tool for reporting and keeping track of data. Important forecasting features will help Your Mates build for the future as they strive to bring even more great beer to the community.
Download the full case study here or book a demo today to learn how Beer30 can help save your brewery’s labor costs.
For many years, Frog Alley in Schenectady, New York, used spreadsheets and printed brew sheets onto paper. If beer or water got on the paper, all the data would melt from the page.
In October 2020, when the Frog Alley team switched to Beer30, they knew that they had more fermentation capacity than they were using—yet from an admin perspective, they weren’t ready for greater production. “We were not in a good place, on the administrative side of brewing, to be able to track lots, be able to organize inventory, store recipes, or be able to look at historical data,” says Laura Clough, of Frog Alley.
Beer30 changed all of this. The software helped the brewery clean things up and boost efficiency. “I feel like Beer30 makes me more efficient, so I don’t have to spend hours in the back to count bags of grain,” Clough says. “I know what we need to order. On the whole, it streamlines and doesn’t require us to have as many side conversations, like, ‘Did you clean that tank?’ or ‘When did you clean that tank?’”
Since starting with Beer30 in 2020, Frog Alley has increased production by using the software’s administrative tools to stay organized and keep track of scaling up. “I feel like we have increased pretty steadily—about 1,000 barrels a year, which feels like a million barrels sometimes,” Clough says.
The company now distributes about 70 percent of its beer to New York State and continues to increase its capacity every year.
Pelican Brewing in Pacific City, Oregon, was going through a period of rapid expansion. To support this growth, they decided to implement the Beer30 Production Suite, alongside their existing ERP system, to take a deeper dive into their brewing process.
Before Beer30, the Pelican team knew they faced challenges with production efficiencies and had difficulties tracking performance trends with different beers. Yet perhaps the biggest issues they faced were those they didn’t even know existed due to poor visibility.
With brewery software, the team was able to bring all of Pelican’s production logs into a single, accurate source. Batch History reporting pulled the entire production process into a comprehensive report for each batch of beer. That gave Pelican’s production team the ability to understand how upstream changes truly impacted the yield and quality of each finished batch—a process that would normally live in anywhere from seven to 15 spreadsheets for breweries using different ERP systems without Beer30.
“We still handle inventory, invoicing, and accounting functions through an MRP/ERP,” says Martin G. Bills, director of brewing operations. “We completely decouple batches from the MRP, track essential data through Beer30, then send finished goods back to the MRP. It’s easy to do, with far fewer keystrokes.”
Variability in the production process is one of the largest sources of inefficiency for any brewery. Whether it’s changes in raw materials over time, differences in yeast generations, inconsistency in performance between team members, or mechanical issues, there are countless sources of variability from batch to batch.
Using Beer30, Pelican was able to easily compare process and quality data from batch to batch, identify when something was out of spec, and use Batch History reporting to quickly identify the root cause. Additionally, Beer30 includes customizable tolerance levels for recipe parameters throughout the brewing process, with dynamic color coding and alerts when something is out of spec.
With real-time text and email feedback alerts, the Pelican team was able to respond to issues quickly and take corrective actions early on, before the issue worsened or affected future batches. When there are potential errors on brew day or during fermentation, each day matters to avoid production delays.
By implementing Beer30 alongside their existing ERP system, Pelican gained the visibility to identify several sources of process variability and areas for improvement in the brewery production process.
As a result of these efforts tracked in Beer30, Pelican Brewing was able to:
“Overall,” says brewery manager Jason Schlebach, “Beer30 has been a great tool to bring on and has brought a lot of light to daily processes that either lived in notebooks and binders, or were muddled in an ERP database that wasn’t really designed for qualitative data. The system is intuitive, user-friendly, and easy to train staff to use.”
If you’re currently using competing brewery software and are thinking about switching, we want you to weigh your options. We know choosing a new software is a difficult decision. If you are interested in finding out more about Beer30 we’re happy to setup a no pressure discovery call where we’ll run through the software and show you how it can work for you.
If you do decide to go with Beer30, you can rest assured that you’re getting some of the best customer support in the industry.
Take a look at what some of our current customers are saying.
“Switching from Ekos to Beer30 has been a no-brainer for us. The ability to see a development roadmap and get really active support has been a game changer. The team at Beer30 has been incredibly responsive to our needs and it feels like we're partners, not just a customer.”
-Brett A. Robison, Silver Branch Brewing
“From onboarding to continuing support requests, Beer30 has been a partner in setting us up for success in the software and working to support our business through product development.”
-Gavin McKenna, Trillium Brewing
“The customer service is f*cking awesome at Beer30.”
-Doug Tibbs, Chandler’s Ford Brewing
“Pulkit and the team at Beer30 have gone above and beyond to help us integrate the system into our business. Day or night we have been able to get any help we needed and the team has shown amazing flexibility in integrating any suggestions we might have.”
-Chris Moore, Sailor’s Grave
If you’re considering brewery software at yours, it can feel like an unnecessary expense—but be sure to consider the money and time you’re losing by not utilizing brewing software. Software such as Beer30 is an investment, but with powerful tools for organizing and streamlining operations, it’s one that could benefit your bottom line and save you time.
If you’re looking for a solution to save time, brew more efficiently, and help scale operations at your brewery, Beer30 might be the answer. Schedule a demo to see if Beer30 brewery software is a good fit for you.
