Brewing schedules

[bndooley]

I'm curious to know how different places set their brewing schedules. What assumptions do you make to be sure that you will meet demand? How do you determine your schedule for the month? How do you project sales, etc? I've been having a hard time finding info on this, and any information would be a great help.

If anyone has a sample brewing schedule for their brewpub, that would be enormously helpful.

Thanks very much.

Best,
Ben Dooley
www.oldcrankybrewers.com

[tarmadilo]

Hiya Ben!

I always operated on the principle that I should fill my fermenters, then fill my serving tanks, and then fill my fermenters again.

Assuming you have unitank fermenters, you can store/age that second round of beers for quite a while while you wait for a serving tank to become available.

Then, as fermenters open back up, you'll know what's selling fastest, and by what percentage, and can brew new batches accordingly...

Cheers, Tim

[bndooley]

Hey Tim,

Thanks for the advice. Did you ever just move the beer in servers into kegs and then just store it? How long can you generally keep beer in kegs (refrigerated) without having to worry about any microbial monkey business?

Best,
Ben
www.oldcrankybrewers.com

[MikeRoy]

Tim as he usually does makes a lot of sense, as my philosophy is pretty much the same. In our pub an empty fermenter is a wasted fermenter so I try to keep them filled and then transfer beer on a need/space basis. If it's a new pub you might want to get cranking on having batches backed up as you might not yet be aware of your product and how it will sell throughout the year. I know right now at this time of the year I'm starting to back up my bigger sellers a few weeks earlier than I normally would.

As far as kegs go, depends on your cleaning of the kegs as well as the beer style. Beer will usually always slowly degrade as it's moved from one vessel to another. I use a three stage cleaning cycle on my kegs with pre/post rinsing and the use of sodium hydroxide,phosphuric acid and iodine in that order.

I find my lighter beers start to go downhill in the keg at about 90-120 days, granted they are not bad, nor are they unfit to sell...they generally don't last much longer than that anyway. My darker beers which sell slower( as most do) have faired better in the long run as they have a higher alcohol,more hops and seem to even smooth themselves out from anywhere up to 8 months ,even as much as a year for an Espresso Stout I made.

My advice is to do the best job you can cleaning kegs, store them as cold as you can and monitor their survival and shelf life (perhaps keep a note book of beer age, flavor profile ect...)

[bndooley]

Thanks for the advice.

It's just that I hear these stories about guys like Dogfish Head who started on really small systems, and they're supposedly brewing three or four times a day, seven days a week, and it made me wonder when they found time to let all of that beer ferment.

Reading back over the response, I actually was a little unclear on one point. Do you keep the serving tanks topped off (I imagine that would make quality control a real problem), or do you let them run out and then do a transfer?

I assume you guys all pretty much stick to a two week fermentation schedule?

Best,

[RobZamites]

I've found *IF* you filter, topping off a serving tank is okay, although at the brewpub I'm getting ready to help start up, I will NOT be doing that. Better safe than sorry is my mantra, ergo, eptying a serving tank, CIPing it, then moving a new beer in is the peace-of-mind method

[tarmadilo]

I usually kegged off beer in a serving tank when it got down to under, say, two barrels. I'd then be able to clean the serving tank and filter in the next batch. I'd actually run the kegged beer to the taps until it was gone, and only then start serving from the serving tank again.

I'm not really strong with lab work, so I tended to err on the side of caution. I almost never blended a new batch into an existing batch, and very rarely filtered a new batch into a just-emptied serving tank without cleaning and sanitizing it.

Regarding a two-week fermentation/aging schedule, yeah, unless it needed more time! I found that more complicated beers tended to need longer to mature, flavorwise.

Cheers, Tim

[bndooley]

Thanks everyone. That's good info.