Can You Get By With One Brewer

How many hours to brew enough beer

Brew God Dennis Richards

When you are planning your brewery, the first question you ask yourself is, how much beer should I brew and how much will I sell? This is a huge question because it influences not only the labor required to produce that beer, but also how much brewing equipment you need.

I have mentioned this in the past, but let’s get this out there first. Most likely you are going to sell less than 1,000 BBL’s per year, possibly way less. Don’t worry however, you will still be able to make money. That is if you are selling that beer across the bar by the pint, crowler, or growler. Please! Don’t go into distributing other than a bar or two.

According to statistics put out there by the Brewers Association (2021), 87% of brewpubs and tasting room breweries will produce less than 1,000 BBL’s. Of those, the majority will produce less than 500.

This means that in most cases, if you have a 7 BBL brewery, you will be brewing once per week, or twice at the most. So let’s look at that.

If you brew twice per week, that’s 28 kegs of beer. Depending on waste, that’s 126 pints of beer. However let’s factor in 10% waste at the bar. Now each keg should produce about 113 pints. Prices across the U.S. run from $5 to $8 a pint. So using a conservative estimate of $6 per pint, times 113 equals $678 per keg. This, times 28 kegs per week equals $18,984, times four weeks per month is $75,936. If you could sell that much beer in your tasting room per month you have no money problems for any expansion you might want to do.

Now with this as an assumption, what do you need for equipment? Well, if you are doing ales with a high floc yeast (we use dry English ale yeast) you can turn over a beer in less than a week in the fermenter. That means you can brew back into the same fermenter on the same day each week. However if you are using a slower fermenting ale yeast it is more like 10 days to 2 weeks, so then you should have at least 3 fermenters for 2 beers per week.

If on the other hand you were doing lagers, then 4 or 5 fermenters. Figure out how many fermenters you need, and add one. That’s so you can play with other beer styles. Yes, we can ferment our ales in a week, but we like to do Belgians and lagers as well, so we have three fermenters. Does that make sense?

What about labor? Even with two brews per week, you only need one brewer. A Monday through Friday schedule might look like this.

1. Monday - Crash the previous Wednesday’s brew. Clean kegs, Clean beer lines, do paperwork.

2. Tuesday - Keg off serving tank, clean and sanitize, transfer last Wednesday’s brew after harvesting yeast off of it. Clean and sanitize fermenter. Do brew prep for next days brew.

3. Wednesday - Crash the previous Friday brew. Brew a new beer.

4. Thursday - Keg off serving tank, clean and sanitize, transfer last Wednesday’s brew after harvesting yeast off of it. Clean and sanitize fermenter. Do brew prep for next days brew.

5. Friday - Brew a new beer. Enjoy an end of day pint with some of your best customers.

Of course there are beerfests on the weekend and repairs always pop up, but with one person you can easily produce 28 kegs per week worth of beer. Most of it will be served out of serving tanks, so there aren’t that many kegs to clean on Mondays.

Depending on what yeast you use will result in how many fermenters you have. With an adequate amount of fermenters you are never waiting for a beer to finish up and that way it doesn’t interfere with your schedule.

By the way if you are selling $75000 worth of beer per month, that $900,000 in beer sales at a gross profit of 90%, you will be able to afford a super nice salary for your brewer. Maybe that’s you as the owner. If so, lucky you.

Does that sound like pie in the sky? It isn’t, and I have worked this way for years. This is a framework so you can see what you really need when setting up your brewery. You may find you just brew once per week in the winter (a three day job) and maybe need extra help in the summer to brew three times, for example.

So plan for success but don’t overdue it. Depending on where you are building your brewery, most likely you don’t need a turn-key 10 or 15 BBL system with 20 or 30 BBL fermenters and double batching you beers. That said, hopefully you have enough room to expand with more fermenters and serving tanks. Thoughts?