Brewery management software

[Baldrick]

I'm wondering what folks are using in terms of brewery management software?

Do you use spreadsheets to manage raw materials, excise, fermentation and finished beer movement?

Does anyone use commercial brewery management software like Ekos Brewmaster? or Orchestrated Beer, or Beer Run?

Most of these are cloud based and charge (not insignificant) monthly fees. Is it worth it for a brewery at 3500 bbl and quickly headed for 4500 bbl per year?

Thanks.

[ccrabtree]

Ditto that question

I too am interested in what small breweries are doing for management software and how the main ones compare with each other. Anyone have experience with multiple management tools? Please share your experience.

[soia1138]

We have been using Ekos with good results. It's reasonable monthly fee for any size brewery and manages everything across the board from production planning, sales and invoicing, self distro, brewers reports, and sync with quicbooks. The customer service is very responsive and its a constant work in progress with improvements all the time.

[jbell71464]

We also use Ekos Brewmaster and would agree with everything Soia1138 said. We looked into Beerrun and Orchestrated Beer is just too much overkill in price and features for a smaller brewery. We felt Ekos offered the most bang for the buck and after about 8 months are still happy with it.

[jbrewer]

ekos

soia1138, what is the monthly fee?

[morolen]

We use Fermentable (https://www.getfermentable.com/) and are quite pleased with it, while not as fully featured as some other programs it is hardware agnostic and runs in a browser. Its cool to have the same screen on your pc and on a tablet in the brewhouse. Darin, the lead dev, is very responsive, is happy to add feature requests AND is a former professional brewer. Great pricing and all that jazz. I can probably answer any specific questions that the site doesnt go over.

[soia1138]

soia1138, what is the monthly fee?

The monthly pricing is based on production volume. I believe it's in the $99/mo ballpark for around 1000bbl/yr . I'm not positive on what the exact tier structure is. Definitely worth an online demo with them to check it out. In addition Ekos is also purely browser based.

[Tim DHBC]

I have been very happy using ekos. It has a bit of a learning curve, and you have to use it to make it worthwhile but I like it. (Meaning don't slack on entering info, use it in real time). It also has an appointment for Mobil devices and since it is cloud based everything is in real time. Helpful if you're out selling so you know inventory.

I would recommend it for sure. I can't imagine trying to use spreadsheets...