How a small brewery plans its week, and why the taproom is the guess
A vertical probe on the small brewery: booked keg orders are the part you can plan against, and taproom pour volume is the guess you plan production around, with one fermentation calendar under both. Written as a probe that states plainly brewing is not Phil's trade and asks brewers to correct it; the transferable part is the fixed-cycle-vs-variable-demand structure from microgreens. General throughout, as no research or applications were attached, so no brewery figures are used. Links the production plan template.
Two orders that behave nothing alike
At the end of a brewing week the kegs go two places. Some are booked: a pub that takes the same two lines every fortnight, a bottle shop, a bar down the road that texts on a Thursday. The rest gets poured over the taproom bar, to whoever walks in. Same beer, same tanks, one production schedule feeding both. And the two behave nothing alike when you try to plan for them.
I should say straight away that brewing is not my trade. I grew microgreens and sold them to trade, and before that I cooked for about a decade. So take this as a probe rather than a lesson. I am setting out how I think a small brewery's week splits, and I would like brewers to tell me where I have it wrong.
The kegs you can plan against
The wholesale side behaves. An account that takes two kegs of the pale every fortnight is a figure you can write down before the week starts. So is the bar that texts on a Thursday, once you have had them long enough to know the Thursday text is coming.
This is the part of the week that can sit on a list: who takes what, in what size, how often. Kept properly, those bookings are an order book. You can total them, you can see the week at a glance, and you can commit tank space to them without holding your breath. The demand is known before you make it.
The taproom is the guess
The taproom is not. It is footfall and weather. A warm Friday empties the bar and a wet Tuesday leaves it half full, and neither of those sends you a message the week before. You cannot book footfall and you cannot invoice it ahead. You can only put beer on and hope the right number of people are thirsty.
That is the guess every maker who sells partly to trade and partly direct ends up carrying. For a bakery it is the counter. For a brewery, as far as I can tell from the outside, it is the pour over the taproom bar. Make too little and you are apologising to a full room on your best night of the month. Make too much and it sits.
One calendar underneath both
The bind is that both draw from the same tanks, and fermentation cannot be hurried. You commit to a brew weeks before you know what the taproom will pour, and by the time the room is busy the decision that fed it was made long ago. A fixed production cycle, feeding demand that is half booked and half a guess.
That structure I do recognise, because it is the microgreens problem exactly. My growing cycle was fixed. I could not make more in the middle of the week if an order jumped, and I could not un-grow a tray if it did not sell. Orders reached me scattered across messages rather than as one list, so I planned from those plus memory, and I got it wrong in both directions: waste some weeks, a shortfall others. The trade was different. The shape of the problem was not.
Size the guess against a settled list
You cannot make the taproom predictable. What you can do is shrink the part you are guessing, by pinning down the part you are not.
If the booked kegs are on one list with a total, the taproom stops being a guess about the whole week and becomes a guess about the remainder: what the tanks will give, minus what is already spoken for. That is a smaller, more honest question, and it is one you can answer weeks ahead when the brew decision is actually made.
This is where makeweek is meant to help, and only this part of it. Each account is a contact, each booking an order with its lines on it, so the "same again, plus one this time" that lands in a WhatsApp message becomes a draft order rather than a note you hope to remember. The bookings total into one production plan you can plan the brew against, and when the kegs go out the invoice follows from the same order instead of being reconstructed on a Sunday. It will not tell you how busy the taproom will be, and it does not track what is in your tanks. It settles the fixed side so the guess is the only thing left to guess at. If you want the bones of that plan on paper first, I have written up a weekly production plan you will actually keep up to date.
Tell me where this is wrong
That is the model from the outside: kegs you can book, a taproom you cannot, and a fermentation calendar that will not bend to either. I am fairly sure of the shape and not at all sure of the detail.
So if you brew: is fermentation the constraint I am treating it as, or is the real limit tank count, or cellar space, or something I have not thought of? Is the taproom actually the unpredictable half, or does the wholesale side wobble more than I am giving it credit for? Tell me where the outsider's version breaks, and I will write the corrected one.