What percentage of your kegs are out in the market, or "float"

[jhallock59]

We are a 30bbl production brewery with a 7bbl pilot. Six year round beers plus seasonal and limited release beers. We have been in operation for 2 1/2 years. Just wondering what percentage of your cooperage is out in the market, or float. It's easy to track the distributor inventories, our inventory and clean or dirty kegs on hand. The problem is the kegs that are out in the market or have been returned to distributors or what I refer to as float. We all know the distributors are in no great hurry to bring cooperage back. We just got a load that had empties from a year ago with keg collars that were practically disintegrated from sitting out in the weather. Planning on purchasing a tracking system as we own all of our cooperage and need to be able to hold the distributors to task on where our kegs are. We are currently running about 30% float and were just wondering what others are running.

Joe Hallock
Chaos Mountain Brewing
Callaway, Va.

[BrewinLou]

No easy answer there Joe. Depends on how far you distribute, the farther you send them the bigger the float.