Brewing a bunch of beers well and doing so consistently over time can’t be done by man alone. Behind every great brewery is also some sort of software to keep everything on track. The bigger and more complex the brewing operation, often the bigger and more complex the software, but what about the microbrewery with the small staff churning out a variety of new beers to keep customers coming back? We’re always on the look out for new software approaches tailored more to this local brewer. Some recent examples:
- Data gathering software and devices created specifically for craft brewing
- Kick back and relax with these software, automation tools
- The Craft Portal: A gateway to beer manufacturing analytics at an extremely reasonable price
- BREWD craft brewery management software adds CRM in latest update
A new solution we just found (profiled by the San Diego Tribune right here) is Beer30 by the 5th Ingredient. The startup is founded by Pulkit Agrawal, a 24-year-old Harvard graduate and former process engineer for Ballast Point, who wanted to take his firsthand experience using data in a successful large-scale brewery and scale a solution that works better for a majority of the small 7,000 craft breweries out there.
From the Tribune:
Agrawal and his chief operating officer Ryan Allis have bootstrapped the company so far, not raising any startup capital and writing all the code themselves (save a few interns and a contractor). They have plans to raise seed money — looking to friends and family round or angels — to hire additional software engineers and support other growth plans in the first half of next year.
How does it work?
The 5th Ingredient’s Beer30 is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) that allows operators and managers to track all batch data from grain-to-glass. It is a monthly subscription that is modular and price-tiered, based on a brewery’s size and needs. Features right now include:
- Dashboard: Live tracking of FV and BBT Statuses.
- Schedule Module: Assign Daily Tasks to Brewers and Operators.Consistent User-Inputted Data to optimize each step of the process: Brew, Ferment, Filter, BBT, Package.
- Inventory Module: Track Grain and Hop Inventory, and get summaries for each brew.
- Distribution Module: Track kegs that have been sold, distributed, and recovered from accounts (with Google Maps!)
- Yeast Module: Track all data for yeast, from the first generation to the last generation.
- Reports: End-to-end Individual Batch Summaries in one location (removing the numerous spreadsheet!)
- Efficiency Calculation: Real-time assessment of brewing, filter, and packaging yields for each batch (maybe you can save money on buying a new tank by optimizing your current processes)..
- Brewer’s Report of Operations: Collect the raw data for the report within seconds.
- Graphing Tools: Visual representation of your data at your at the click of a button.
For anyone interested, their site is promoting a 30 Day Free Trial right here.
Jorge Biedermann says
Santi González
Gina Rene says
After checking this out, I think there are better software solutions out there. But to each their own