Tim Faith has worn a lot of hats at a lot of breweries and beverage producers. He’s run the barrel program at New Holland, been an Innovation Brewer at Goose Island, run technical services for Mark Anthony, and eventually served as the brewmaster for Octopi when it scaled its brewing and co-packing operations from 216,000 barrels a year to more than 800,000. In his work, Faith has seen breweries both small and massive wrestle with all measures of software and technology issues. He’s watched multi-million barrel breweries operate almost entirely on paper and others using personal Gmail accounts to deal in proprietary information. He has some advice for managing digital operations within your brewery.
Start Early
Faith advises breweries to start organizing their digital files early and then grow with the system instead of getting big and realizing too late in the game they need a different system.
“I recommend seeing what’s available and what’s the best fit for them and then jump into something early and grow with it,” Faith says. “That’s better than trying to completely reinvent the wheel or go cold turkey into something brand new when you’re already too late. At Octopi, I felt like if we were going to go towards something, it had to happen right then and there. Otherwise we would have been too big to change it.”
Build It Yourself
While there are countless software options for both your brewery and back-of-the house administrative operations, Faith tells brewers they don’t have to necessarily go with something on the market. “If you have the option and talent to build your own, do it,” he says. Faith recalls that Goose Island home built its own process software for running the brewhouse and had an independent contractor come in and write code as they went and addressed changes as needed. He notes that even with a lot of larger brewery equipment and software providers, technical support or little things can not meet your needs. “A lot of these larger companies are like, ‘oh yeah, we tailored all this equipment for what you need,’ and then the software side just falls flat again and again,” he says. “You can have state of the art equipment, but if you do not have the full support of the engineering team and technical support team, it doesn’t matter.”
Faith notes that a lot of out-of-the-box software options are inflexible and it can be hard to get it to perform as you need. “A lot of the framework is very stringent and tailored specifically to one process,” he notes. “So if we do something different, we have to find all of these workarounds.”
Start By Digitizing Your Documents
One easy way to start building your own software is to start by managing your digital information on subjects like fermentation. As Octopi, we noticed that all the legacy co-packers were still pretty much operating entirely on paper, which was a big struggle for getting information,” he says. “It was kind of like a black box. ‘Hey, I need this information on this fermentation, and it would take three weeks for them to finish the product, package it, and then a stack of paperwork would have to be scanned in, and then I would get the results. And by then, tracing information was terrible.”
In response, Octopi digitized all of its paperwork. He recommends breweries do the same and start simply. “Documentation and traceability are probably two of the areas that would just hit a home run for any brewery,” Faith says. “Just having some degree of traceability to say, ‘we brewed that batch back in August, what did we do?’ In this day and age, you’d be surprised how many breweries are still just running things completely on paper. If you have some sort of way of referencing and storing that information, that’s very useful.” Faith recommends starting with Google Sheets, which he says “is a very good tool.” “I would start there, trying to digitize your stuff so you don’t have to rely on a scanner. God knows how many pieces of paper a brewery has and that are unorganized. Documentation, traceability, and organization are a great start, even if it’s super rudimentary.”
Rely On Your Team
One of the biggest mistakes brewery managers and owners make, Faith says, is not soliciting employee input early in the process. “If you’re at the point of considering software, you likely have plenty of brewing talent that has had at least some experience using it,” he says. “Your operators are going to be the ones at the front line, so give them some say. You may employ people that have a wide background of experiences, and you never know who you have working for you. Getting employee feedback on those kinds of areas is really crucial. I’ve been at breweries where it’s just like, ‘hey, we’re doing this,’ and people were like, ‘What the hell? I know all about this. You didn’t even ask me.’ I think just that goes a long way to kind of just get that input from your employees, because then they have more ownership, they feel more valued.”
He also recommends creating a culture when change is built in as a core value. “Being nimble and open to change are things to drill into your employees,” he says. “Get them to expect things to change and be open to it, but also hear them out. It’s all going to continuously evolve.”
Faith also notes the critical importance of listening to your employees and soliciting their feedback as things grow. “Sit your whole team down once a month and ask them how things are working and if we need to change anything,” he says. “That’s something that I relied heavily on when we were digitizing the brewery. We would literally sit down the team, do some training, roll it out to them, and then a week later say, ‘how is this working? Do we need to change anything?’ That generated this really good, cohesive feedback loop that allowed us to tailor our system and platform for operating the brewery where everybody was happy with how it worked.