Tap Social grow their business with Breww

Under the direction of Director Matt Elliott and Head Brewer Jason Bolger, Tap Social brews a range of modern, accessible beer highlighted by a year-round core range, including the brewery's best-selling 5.1% IPA Time Better Spent. In addition to its brewery, Tap Social manages a taproom, Grade II-listed pub, commercial bakery, and Lock 29 bar at Banbury.

Why did you start using Breww?

Our entire operations day to day running was organised within a custom-built spreadsheet. This worked for a time, but as we began to grow our output and brewery headcount, it was more apparent that this was not the right system and was having an impact on our way of working and efficiencies. In a bid to improve this, we opted for a generic platform which, on the surface, showed that there would be benefits to the business in efficiency. However, the generic option did not allow for the specific requirements that our industry needs.  Our journey to Breww began, and after the initial demo, it was clear that Breww was built to cater for all of our brewery requirements. 

Which Breww features could you not live without?

Stock and inventory management, in particular, the pre-brew stock check, has proved to be an absolute game changer. Prior to a planned batch, you can easily see the available stock and even include recipes not planned in to view how this will impact your inventory stocks. Any shortfalls in ingredients can automatically raise purchase orders for suppliers to cover. Breww also allocates the oldest stock to the batch, meaning that your inventory is as fresh and up-to-date as possible.

Opting for advanced deliveries has saved hours of admin time each week, allowing our director to shift focus away from routing, giving the ability to focus on important tasks which will have had a direct impact on our business growth.

The huge number of integrations with Breww have streamlined our flow massively, in particular Shopify and Kegstar. Setting up our Shopify account with Breww was so simple and seamless, in fact, it was up and running overnight and allows our sales to be managed so easily. The sales data automatically populates in Breww, our whole team is always up to date with the actual stock values, and we are confident to drive our sales as a result of putting our trust in Breww. The Kegstar integration was another game changer, managing and tracking our kegs via spreadsheets was an almost impossible task with not trustworthy data for their true location. Resulting in missed deadlines due to needing available containers at the brewery ready for our team to fill. Breww manages all of this, we know where they are, when they need collecting, and we can even allocate the most efficient route for collection.

How has your business grown since using Breww?

We have seen great benefits with Breww’s vast monitoring features. The ability to track the batch along the total production journey and compare it directly to previous batches has proved so valuable. Enabling this comparison of like-for-like batches has meant we can make changes confidently at the very optimum moment along the process. Even drill down to the point at which a change or issue may have occurred, allowing us to take action to prevent this in the current batch—enabling us to confidently speed up our processes safely in the knowledge that our batches are ready for the next stage of the brewing process. We have even been able to hone our recipes, practices and ways of working, confidently knowing when the batch is ready to be dry hopped, for example, and know how this compares directly to the previous batch. Resulting in a much more accomplished end result which is easily repeatable to our exact standards.

As a direct result of using Breww we have been able to focus our efforts on growing the business. Increasing our production and confidently drive forward our sales efforts. Managing the business from spreadsheets left so many stumbling blocks in organisation and traceability.

Would you recommend Breww to other breweries?

Yes, 100%! Breww has delivered huge improvements to our business. I am very happy to promote to others something which I believe in so strongly, like Breww.

Breww has given me personally as well as professionally enormous benefits. Reducing stress and concerns, detailing raw materials, planned packaging and packaged goods stock always updated and available on your phone or laptop to check in on.