As we’ve touched on in the past, keeping track of raw material inventory – like yeast – is crucial to maximizing any manufacturing business’ efficiency and profit.
When considering this, most brewers’ think of stacked boxes of hops in their cold box or grain sacks over by their mill. Monitoring the intake and utilization of these everyday items is important and straightforward. Especially when you have a powerful tool like Beer30! But we don’t stop there.
Our team has spent a great deal of time thinking about beer’s most vital and variable base ingredient: yeast. Beer30 software helps brewers tracking their yeast inventory, performance and viability. We also do it in a customizable manner that suits their individual preferences and operations, which really sets it apart.
Here’s how:
Tracking the cost of goods on hand for one-and-out resources like hops, malt and adjuncts is relatively simple. Goods are purchased and adjustments are based on use until your inventory is depleted.
But, things get more complicated when tracking the true cost of yeast. How should you calculate the cost of a resource that can be used across multiple beers?
Do you write off the cost for a lot on day one? Or, should you amortize and apply the total cost of a lot across all of the batches of beer it is applied to? Do you hold off until you reach the end of a yeast lot’s productive lifespan? With our brewery data management software, you have the option to pick your own path and do any of the above!
It’s important that our brewery management software be an effective asset for brewing operations of any size. That means providing flexibility where it’s called for. Yeast tracking is one of those areas.
Beer30 supports multiple approaches to yeast cost tracking, realizing there are numerous right ways to solve a problem. It all comes down to what’s best for your company based on its size, operations, accounting systems, etc.
The Beer30 Yeast Dashboard shows the details of all yeast inventory that you have available to pitch, harvest and propagate.
Yeast labs use innovative technologies which make their strains stronger and more reliable. However, it still requires more oversight than other ingredients in beer. Yeast can surprise you more than any other ingredient in the brewing process. Sometimes for better, and sometimes for worse!
With Beer30, brewers do more than keep up with yeast inventory. They can record the results of yeast analysis which includes: cell counts, viability, generation and performance history. More importantly, they can add as many additional fields as they want to track with our custom fields module!
Brewers and staff will be able to add in custom fields and metrics like cell counts, generations, viability as it is brought in or harvested from a tank.
Using our brewery management software to track yeast inventory by lot also becomes handy in worst-case scenario situations. For instance, if your yeast provider issues a product recall, the back tracking of every batch potentially impacted is quick and easy. Therefore, you can react instantly to nullify the threat and account for potential loss.
Yeast is unlike any other primary beer ingredient because each pitch equates to a new chapter in an often long story in its history. A history that covers multiple beer styles and many months bringing each beer to life.
Beer30 takes this complex story and turns it into a powerful tool for managing yeast. Our software uses genealogy charts to build visual representations as it is automatically tracked through every batch of beer it touches. The entire history of your yeast inventory is searchable and filterable to make the tool even more powerful.
Use Beer30 to generate yeast genealogy trees that are filterable and searchable by brand, batch, dates and yeast strain.
The branches of these trees include the triumphant chapters in your yeast’s story. For example, you can log stalled fermentations that required an additional pitch or any number of anomalies that may occur.
The Beer30 genealogy trees show you how each parent and child node are interconnected for true traceability.
Not all of the yeast a brewer uses comes from a company like White Labs, Lallemand or Wyeast. One brewery will provide it to another. Our software notes the source of intra-brewery pitches and track its performance at your brewery.
We also understand that many brewers like to mix and match different strains in beers! Brewers can do yeast substitutions and add in different variations from different brinks or pitches while knocking out a beer. This also shows up in the genealogy trees!
In Beer30, you can do yeast substitutions dynamically in either Brew or Ferment mode.
Yeast plays arguably the most important role in the production of beer or, more importantly, quality beer. Therefore, it must be regarded and monitored in a significant way. But all too often it isn’t. Its dynamic nature leads brewers and data-management software developers to throw up their hands instead of attempting to track it. This creates a major blind spot that hurts a brewery’s operation.
At Beer30, we understand the challenges of tracking yeast costs and performance. In order to help you save time, increase profits and brew more beer, our team developed the best brewery management software devoted to fermented beverages to help brewers overcome these monotonous challenges.
Do you want to know more about how we can help you track and manage yeast inventory and utilization at your brewery? We’d love to discuss it with you. Schedule a FREE demo today!
Brandon Hernández is a contributing writer for The 5th Ingredient who provides freelance marketing services to companies in the beer industry. You can reach Brandon via email.
