Still new to Breww so happy to have things pointed out I’ve missed.
We offer contract services to others, so we produce for them not the other way as the current help files cover.
We have a number of questions we can’t get our head round all the down the line consequences, or the way Breww is designed for us to use it:
-
Do we have to set up each specific contract “beer” up with a recipe or can we use a generic per abv version? I suspect each specific beer for down the line labelling issues etc but trying to avoid significant extra admin here. Would/Could it work setting up abv specific contract generic items?
-
Generally we provide some ingredients and the client provides some so it’s not already in our inventory. Do we set up a recipe to just “use up” the inventory items we have, or do we have to set up a complete recipe with every item and bring in all the clients inventory items as inventory receipts(extra admin)? If so what do we then do to avoid it affecting our landed costs and stock levels if it is not all used up for the batch (and therefore returned). Some items will be new so not affect our averages but some items do overlap for example where local breweries want to bring their own pale malt etc.
-
Racking, do we need every client specific product or will “Contract 4.5% Firkin” etc work as a product set-up? Where is duty and production handled for these?
Again trying to limit admin but understand if not feasible. Trying to think through all consequences
Biggest headache is the recipe and what to do with ingredients supplied by the client without affecting our averages/inventory/costs. Also wanting to document traceability via Breww if possible but not essential as we could still do old school there.
Any advice (and considerations we’ve not even had yet/mentioned above) gratefully accepted.
Cheers all.
1 Like
Hi Claire,
Thanks for posting! No problem at I will do my best to answer all your questions.
-
I think you have it about the right for the first point. If not for labelling (as this would cause a problem later down the line), I don’t see a problem with the generic ABV approach, but I think sticking with a specific beer is a better idea, and hopefully, as I answer your other questions, you will agree.
-
The best solution here is only possible if you use Breww’s batch-sharing features and the contractee uses Breww as well. In this situation, both parties can add ingredients from their respective sides, so their ingredients would never enter your stock, but all could be tracked in the event of a recall. A potential other option would be to add a completely separate stock item dedicated to just your contractee stock. It would be a bit of extra admin work, but this way, your costs don’t get mixed up. A third option would be to set up your contractee as a supplier for each stock item, then costs are separated for when you’re entering new costs, but you’d find your average landed cost would be affected here.
-
For racking, the product will need to be created for the beer chosen. So if you have chosen to go with a generic beer, then you can have a generic product, but if you have specific beers, you’d need specific products for each one. It depends on your needs. For printing labels, you would see the generic product name. You could change this each time you print labels, but it would probably be more work. Either way, the ABV can be set on the batch itself and be different from the beer that’s set up, and the duty can just follow the batch.
I hope this helps, and please let us know if there is anything I haven’t covered or if you have any other questions at all.
Thanks for this response we’re working through it and possible options that might work for us.
The majority of our clients don’t unfortunately have Breww and we don’t want to affect aggregate costs so if we create a full recipe we have to set up new ingredient inventory items so we’re not affecting our costing and available ingredient data. Do you see any Breww related issue with us creating the partial recipe so only consuming our stock items and keeping a paper full version for traceability for the client/records?
We’re considering as suggested setting each recipe and beer up as it’s specific name but trying not to have all the lists cluttered and confusing for the production floor. I’ve set up our client/customer as contract brewer on their record but see no way to link which of the beers or recipe’s belong to them. Is there any feature for this or for filtering the beer and recipe lists for the contract brews so the production team know which beer named “Pale Ale” belongs to which client and therefor which beer/recipe to brew, as we’ve literally just had a near miss as the right beer/recipe was on page 2 and they’re still new to Breww!
It seems like all the contract brew features are geared towards asking others to brew the beer rather than our situation where we brew for others, is this the case or am I still fundamentally mis understanding the Breww set-up and seeing this the wrong way round? I asked JC about this in our prep work and he gave me the impression these features would work for us in our situation as the contract brewer. There is the option to choose the radio button against a new batch Contract brewed in house for others but I just can’t find the features linked to that option.
If we do end up going generic to avoid production confusion/assumptions at which point can I change the beer name on the label? Do I have to change the template as I cannot see a field on the print label feature only notes, barcode or BBE over ride?
Cheers
I don’t see an issue with creating a partial recipe and keeping external records of the other stock items used in the batch.
I see your issue with having lots of beers and recipes for your contractees and getting them confused when they’re just called ‘Pale ale’, etc. There’s currently no way to assign a beer/recipe to a contractor/ee, but this could be a potential solution we could do for you. I’d bet others would find this helpful as well.
If you went with a generic beer and product, you’d currently need to change the beer’s name itself from the generic one to the actual name before you printed the label and then change it back afterwards. This wouldn’t be ideal, of course! We could look to add a ‘name override’ field, but there would be a few places in which this would be needed (multiple places you can print labels, plus planned packagings). I’m not sure this would be the best solution going forward for some technical reasons, as well as the fact you’d also need to be entering the beer’s and product’s names every time, which could lead to a typo getting in a big print run or something.
We do have plenty of features for contractors, but there are evidently some specifics for your situation that you’d benefit from us adding! I think the best solution here would be to add a feature for classifying beers and recipes to contractees. Then you’d need to create the individual beers with their own names. What are your thoughts?
Hiya Matt,
Thanks for that and the explanation and ideas, we’re getting closer and a better understanding of Breww thank you all for your patience and tolerance from the team here with all our qns. I’m asking them publicly so hopefully they might help others or others may chip in and help us with how they manage it.
We’ve decided to go down the specific beer and recipe route per contract and we will obsolete them for the time until there is any kind of filtration on the list and that might be enough for now. It would be great if that can be a feature request if you think it would work through the process to assign beers and recipes to contract clients to keep them seperate.
We’ve followed the suggestion to set up a 2nd inventory item for client supplied items with a prefix so we can differentitate and preserve our costs and we can edit which inventory item is on the recipe dependent on supplier i.e. “Carapils” or “CONTRACT Carapils” etc. We’ll raise inventory receipts for their goods in but at £0 and 0 VAT which will hopefully pan out ok long term?
When we supply ingredients for the contract we charge them to the client at cost, they will obviously be consumed from the batch production but is there any clever trick or suggestion on how to have the items/costs transferred to a customer invoice etc or would that be a manual process? I considered making them a stock item product like our merch but would that duplicate usage? If not would it be easy to then exclude them from price lists for non contract customers?
Thanks again for working through this with us, loving Breww and this community/team support.
Cheers
Great! Yes, this is the perfect question to go on the public forum to help others!
Yes, it sounds like those processes should work okay. Be sure to let us know if anything crops up.
Regarding charging for the ingredient use, if you created a stock item product, this would use up double the stock. What I’d recommend is creating a ‘service product’, which has no stock levels. You can then add the service product(s) to the order. Depending on how specific you need to be, you could just create one service product for e.g. ‘Ingredient cost’, then assign it a specific price incorporating the total ingredient cost. Alternatively, if you wanted a greater breakdown, you could of course create a separate service product for each ingredient.
Thank you for the kind words; it’s great to see our support appreciated!
HI Claire,
We don’t contact brew at all - but I was wondering if you used Tags on the Beer, this might help you sort with managing this better?
I’m thinking if you has Beer - ‘Pale Ale 1’ and tagged it with ‘For Brewery A’ - this might help show what belongs to whom a little more on the Beer List Page.
2 Likes
Hi Steve, Great suggestion! Whilst you can’t see this tag in the productions screens, you can click on the beer in an open batch and immediately see its tag. Plus, as Steve has said here, this is also visible from the beers list too.
Thanks that’s a great idea, we’re not utilising tags I suspect to full advantage so will add those for now as well and gen up on them a bit more too.
Thank again for the suggestion Steve, really appreciate it.
2 Likes