Pay Attention to Your Taproom Data, Not What You Read Online
Retail data that you find in trade magazines or industry reports is built on averages. And while averages can provide context, they don’t tell the full story of your brewery’s performance—especially your taproom. Those numbers can be skewed, and they certainly don’t reflect what’s happening in the trenches of your business.
The $200 Mistake You Make With Every Small Batch of Beer
Overhead is the forgotten cost in brewery economics—especially with experimental or small-batch beers. Because there’s both art and science to allocating overhead, many brewers skip it entirely or under-allocate it.
Understanding Sales Velocity: How Fast is Your Beer Moving?
Sales velocity is a simple but powerful calculation that measures how fast your beer is selling in the retail channel. It’s simply the number of barrels (bbl) you’re shipping per week of a given beer to a given account. Tracking sales velocity helps you identify which account/product combos are top performers and which are dragging.
Benchmarking Brewery Labor Costs and Keeping Them in Check
Benchmarking labor costs is important for craft breweries, like yours, to manage profitability and ensure you’re operating efficiently. By tracking key performance indicators like labor cost as a percentage of revenue and revenue per labor hour, you can compare these expenses against industry benchmarks and identify areas that need attention.
Navigating Your Brewery Through Distributor Staff Turnover
Relationships are a big part of business. If you have a brand manager that you are in harmony with and all of a sudden they are laid off (or go looking for greener pastures), you've lost a valuable intangible asset. Conversely, if there was a rockstar sales rep that hyped your awesome beer to bars and retailers, losing them could create problems too.