Four Strategies to Stretch Your Brewing Budget
Saving money can be difficult. Hell, it can be downright painful. Remember your house from college? Rent split thirteen ways, one bathroom, no hot water, no A/C. No one paid the power company one month, so someone just ran an extension cord next door.
Fortunately, controlling costs at your brewery doesn’t need to run afoul of any OHSA regulations. In fact, we’ve compiled several efficient, money-saving products that are designed to help improve yield, quality, and even profitability. The best part? No paywall. Check ‘em out.
- Get more hop bang for your hop buck
More and more brewers are discovering the benefits of concentrated hop products: increased yield, decreased losses, and lower shipping and storage costs. And because the natural hop oils, resins, and acids are so much more concentrated compared to T-90 pellets or whole cone hops, you can achieve the same (or an even bigger!) impact with a smaller amount of raw material. Use enriched hop pellets, TNS hop oils, and CO2 hop extract to stretch your hop budget across multiple brands and batches.Just remember: with great hop potency comes great hop responsibility. Whether using enriched pellets, hop oils, or hop extract, pilot batches and bench trials will be your best friend in determining the optimal usage rate.
“We had more packageable beer in the end because there was less vegetal residue in the beer from hops. We’ve had to push back and delay previous West Coasts due to clarity issues, but this was ready right on time and reliable. And it improved yield.”BlackStack Brewing used TNS HopBurst® to augment their regularly-scheduled dry hop addition – read what happened here.
- Stretch your fermenting tanks
Wouldn’t it be cool to be able to manually expand your FVs whenever you need more capacity? Fortunately for those of us who are steel bending-challenged, our friends at Kerry have us covered:FermCap™ Eco is a new plant-based alternative to silicon-based foam control products. By reducing foam formation during fermentation, it can effectively increase fermenter capacity by up to 15% – giving you that much more room for sellable beer out of each turn (and it can benefit hop utilization and foam stability to boot!). - Reduce time spent reducing diacetyl
What if we told you that you could spend time saying “alpha acetolactase decarboxylase” instead of extending tank residency for diacetyl rests?Just kidding, everybody calls it ALDC.ALDC is an enzyme that bypasses the production of diacetyl during fermentation when added to the tank along with yeast, breaking down its precursor compounds and diverting it to the largely flavorless acetoin. ALDC is effective at fighting hop creep and diacetyl formation in packaging, too.
“We brew a lot of lager. Not having to worry about doing a diacetyl rest, ALDC can shave a week off the turnaround time on a lager. If we can save time without sacrificing quality, we’re going to explore it.”Eric Bramwell of Riverlands Brewing tried ALDC and hasn’t looked back – get the story in his own words here.
- Implement ride sharing (for your yeast)
For a small brewery producing many different beer styles, yeast can quickly become a big portion of your raw material costs. And even brewers equipped for in-house propagation might sleep better knowing there’s a doomsday stash in the walk-in in the event of a problem fermentation.Enter Fermentis!Fermentis’s range of active dry brewing yeast is more shelf-stable than liquid cultures, and it can be shipped with pallets of malt and your other regularly scheduled raw material deliveries. And thanks to advances in technology and increased demand, there’s a high-quality dry brewing yeast strain for any style in your brand portfolio.For more on Fermentis, E2U (“easy to use”), and dry brewing yeast cultures, check out Zen and the Art of Stress-free Fermentation.
From stretching your hop budget to helping you save time, we’re efficient at finding efficiencies! To get our logistics, finance, and sales teams working for you, get in touch with BSG at https://bsgcraftbrewing.com/contact-us/.