Sponsored How Does Raw Material Forecasting Increase Your Profit and Production?

As a brewer or brewery owner, there is a lot to consider when it comes to brewing your next batch of beer. What ingredients do you need? Where are you going to source your hops, malt, yeast, etc.? How much do you need of each? Without the right tools and processes in place, all these little tasks can build up into one big headache, especially when considering that ordering too many materials, the wrong ingredients, or low-quality ones can seriously hurt your bottom line and your final product.

Photography courtesy of @mirrortwinbrewing | Mirror Twin Brewing

It takes a great deal of preparation and accuracy to make beer, so it’s crucial to be as structured as you can while anticipating your ingredients and maintaining your margins.

That’s the challenge facing brewers across the country every single day.

The reality is that making beer can be very expensive and every penny saved counts.

Keeping track of your past purchasing habits for certain batches of beer can help you forecast what to buy in the future, maximizing your production and profit.

Even though raw material forecasting is such an important part of running a beer business, historically, brewers or brewery owners have kept track of all their inventory, ingredients, and recipes through good ol’ fashion spreadsheets. But these can get tedious to fill out and ultimately don’t provide any type of reporting or tracking to show where you’re potentially overspending or where you’ve maximized your raw materials inventory in the past.

We feel one of the best ways to effectively manage all of your inventory, forecasting, and recipes is through brewery management software.

One like Ollie, an all-in-one brewhouse tool built by brewers and for brewers to manage all brewery operations from recipe creation to raw material forecasting.

Just take a look at Mirror Twin Brewing in Lexington, Kentucky, who implemented Ollie to help streamline their brewery productions when it came to predicting materials, speed, and pricing.

The result: Ultimately, Mirror Twin increased their profit and doubled their production capacity by implementing brewery management software.

Photography courtesy of @mirrortwinbrewing | Mirror Twin Brewing

Any good brewer knows how important an accurate inventory list is when it comes to placing orders and staying on budget.

But Mirror Twin Co-Owner and Director of Brewing Operations Derrek DeFranco perhaps understands this a little bit more. He opened the brewery in 2016 in the popular Warehouse Block neighborhood in Lexington with a unique idea: to let consumers drink pairs of beers with identical recipes except for one ingredient.

It’s a particular concept and one that requires meticulous planning and production on the back end.

At first, DeFranco used another brewery management software, but that system proved to be difficult to use, hard to train his team on, and inefficient. Eager to improve his beer production, DeFranco made the switch to Ollie.

“Inventory control was a problem for our brewery before we found Ollie,” says Derrek DeFranco, Co-Owner and Director of Brewing Operations. “It was a constant struggle to keep an accurate amount of grain inventory and hops per year. By utilizing the raw material forecasting feature, my team and I can accelerate forward knowing we are fully prepared to brew.”

Ollie made it simple for DeFranco to precisely measure when he needed extra grain or hops for a recipe and when to create purchase orders for the next batch.

“What I appreciate is that Ollie allows me to pull a full report detailing all the specific ingredients my team needs, whichever beer we are preparing to brew,” says DeFranco. “It’s simple to send vendors email purchase orders for raw materials as opposed to figuring out what I need to order by memory.”

Photography courtesy of @mirrortwinbrewing | Mirror Twin Brewing

Ease of use is important to DeFranco to keep operations at Mirror Twin running smoothly and efficiently all year round.

“Ollie is more intuitive for me as a brewer,” says DeFranco. “I didn’t need much time to train my brewers on how to use it because the layout and interface are so straightforward.”

Accordingly, DeFranco actually added an iPad with Ollie installed right on the brew deck. Everyone on staff has access to it and can easily receive the same degree of system training at any time.

Overall, Ollie’s technology helped DeFranco forecast Mirror Twin’s materials ahead of time and efficiently manage every part of their operations and supply. This allowed him the freedom and flexibility to schedule production up to six months out, keeping Mirror Twin on track and on budget.

“Ollie takes care of my back end while propelling my brewery forward,” says DeFranco. “At Mirror Twin Brewing, we enjoy brewing the best beer possible for our customers coast to coast. I wouldn’t look at any other brewery management system on the market.”

Ready to Simplify Your Brewery Operations? Start With Ollie

Ollie’s software was created by brewers for brewers. The all-in-one brewery software manages your process, from raw materials to finished goods. Request a free demonstration today.

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