We frequently swap casks with other breweries. When they send us a cask, we look after it like it was our own (and expect them to do likewise). Breww does not support this, so we have a parallel system for doing it, which is quite painful (see below). It would make life easier if this was integrated with Breww.
(Reading around this topic, I see that Breww used to support this and no longer does, which is a shame.)
Part 1 of the requirement is to associate a guest beer with a guest cask, and to track where that cask goes, until the point that we return it to its owner.
Part 2 is to support back-fills. We rarely return the cask empty. Preferably, we fill their cask with our beer and send it back to them as part of the next swap. So we need Breww to support this “our beer in their cask” scenario.
Part 3 is the mirror of part 2, when the other brewery sends a back-fill. In this circumstance, their beer arrives in our cask, and we need to track where that goes until the cask gets returned empty to us.
To give you a sense of why this is important to us, here is what we do at the moment:
- Part 1 we track using a spreadsheet. The fact that this is not integrated makes planning uplifts more difficult.
- Part 2 we pretend that their cask is a non-returnable when racking, just so we can put the beer into something in Breww.
- Part 3 there really isn’t any workaround that I can see. At the moment Breww thinks the cask is returned empty when it is in fact full of a foreign beer, so we transfer that cask to a virtual location to mark it “out of action” while simultaneously using another spreadsheet to track what’s actually in the cask and where it went.
Of course, if there is a better way to do this, then please let me know!