Breww has dedicated tools for managing when another brewery produces beer for you.
Setting up
Firstly, you’ll need to set up your contract brewer(s) in Production → View → Contract brewers → New contract brewer. When creating your contract brewer, you’ll be able to specify all the details relating to them and how the duty on beer they produce is handled (for example whether they pay it, or you do). Depending on the options chosen, you may be prompted to enter their production volumes so that Breww can calculate the applicable duty.
Using the contract brewer functionality
Now that your contract brewer is set up, you can plan and start batches of beer with them. To do this, head to Production → Actions → New contract brewed batch. You can also choose whether you’re supplying any ingredients here through the inclusion of a recipe and where any stock you provide will be taken from.
Once you start the batch, it will be presented in the same way as batches you brew yourself, in that you can log fermentation readings, plan packaging events and store notes.
If you and your contract brewing partner both use Breww, you can take advantage of our batch-sharing functionality. More on this can be seen at:
Receiving your beer back from the contract brewer
Beer can be received back from your contract brewer by going into the batch itself and using the Actions → Rack (package) button. The racking process is the same as that of any beers you produce yourself, allowing you to specify what products the beer is being racked into & include any additional stock items from your inventory. You can create multiple racking instances from the same contract brewed batch, say for example that half of the batch was kegged and the remainder was canned. Stock labels for anything you’ve racked from a contract-brewed batch can be accessed and printed under the “Actions” tab of the batch.
Selling contract brewed beer
Once the contract-brewed batch has been racked, it will now be represented in your products list and available for sale. Depending on how the contract brewer has been configured, this beer will either be held in duty suspense (with duty payable by you upon delivery to your customers), or have the duty already paid by the contract brewer (with no further duty payable by you).
Just a quick question on contract brewing. Does contract brewed beer appear as a stock item and thus included as an inventory receipt of sorts in the Xero integration. I can’t seem to see that it’s possible right now but it would be great to have contract brewed batches count as receiving stock/inventory receipts so that the stock values could sync to Xero. Cheers
When you enter a contract brewed batch, the beer won’t appear as a stock item, it goes in as a packaged beer product, like if you were to rack it from your own batch. We don’t currently sync products with Xero, but could look into this if it would be helpful.
It would be great to get products synced to Xero so we can get accurate real time stock values between the balance sheet and p&l in Xero. We’re just starting to use the inventory receipt & stock sync with Xero so not totally sure how the integration works just yet.
Just another question on contract brewers. Is it possible to use the Breww app to rack beer from contract brewers into our own containers? All I can see on the normal racking page is the option to scan in the scanner data which I’m guessing means we’d need a third party scanner?
Thanks for the question.
At the moment, you can’t rack from a contract brewed batch directly from the app.
When using the web view on mobile, you won’t be able to use the mobile’s camera, unfortunately. You can only manually enter containers, or use a dedicated barcode scanner.
Being able to rack from contract brewed batches in the app is on the task list, I’ll add a vote on your behalf to the task.
Question about contract brewing, we are about to receive our first contract brewed batch. The contract brewer packaged the beer in cans, and they provided the cans. We provide the labels and boxes. To complete the batch in Breww I would create and rack into a smallpack multipack. But this product then comprises 24x cans and lids which would come from our stock. The question is, how can I rack this without using our cans from stock? Do I need to create a container that is a can-with-no-can, ie does not include the can and lid stock items? Then make a product with those ghost cans and our actual boxes and labels? Or am I missing something here… Thanks in advance for any help!
When you’re going through the racking process, you’ll get to a step titled “Stock items used”. At this step, the items that you’ve linked to the product/container type will be pre-filled, but you are free to adjust them as needed.
You can click the delete button next to the cans, leaving the labels & boxes and then Breww will only use these items when completing the racking. The final step of the process is a confirmation screen and so you should be able to double-check this looks as expected before confirming.
