Almost every brewery is tracking their data – whether it’s in a spreadsheet, paper logs, or an electronic brewery management system. As breweries start scaling, there are two key areas that brewers and owners start looking at for their products — (1) making consistent quality beer and (2) improving costs over time.
However, for many operators and owners, it can be difficult to know exactly what to do to get started with this analysis, or to understand if these are the best practices for your brewery. Many times, the process data is tracked, but the data just ends up sitting in a binder, locked in a spreadsheet, or in a constantly growing database.
In this talk, we will explore 10 examples of taking the data and looking at how we can focus on brewing more efficiently and turn those data numbers into profit. We will go through different examples in the brewing process, fermentation, yeast, and even touch upon COGS and profitability. The overall goal is to take your brewery’s data to make educated decisions to #BrewMoreBeer and #BrewBetterBeer.
Pulkit K. Agrawal (PK) is the Founder and CEO of The 5th Ingredient®, a leading brewery operations management software company dedicated to helping breweries improve beer quality and consistency. After graduating from Harvard College, Agrawal began working in the beer industry as a Process Engineer for Ballast Point Brewing, where he focused on packaging lines and nitrogen beer. He soon discovered a need in the market for software that expanded beyond standard inventory management systems, where there would be an emphasis on the brewing process and quality, not just inventory tracking. In January 2018, Agrawal launched Beer30®, a brewery data management system that offers grain-to-glass process data tracking. Beer30 focuses on real-time brewing data input, raw material inventory, cost of goods analysis, quality and sensory tracking, sales and distribution and accounting integration. Beer30 is currently in over 300 breweries globally, helping to #BrewMoreBeer and #BrewBetterBeer across the nation. In his free time, Agrawal enjoys traveling, and speaking about entrepreneurship and using data to improve brewery efficiency and quality.