Can you give us a quick overview of Snake Lake, your role, and how long you've been using Breww?
Snake Lake Brewing is a brewery and distillery based in Sylvan Lake, Alberta. We produce beer, RTDs and spirits, with our own taproom as well as wholesale distribution across Alberta.
I'm the General Manager and have been in the role since April 2025. I started using Breww pretty much immediately when I joined (I implemented the software), so I've been working with it since April 2025 at Snake Lake. Prior to that I implemented it at Rival Trade Brewing late 2024.
What were you using to run the business before Breww, and what pushed you to look for something new?
I didn't personally use it a lot, but the software was called Unleashed, which was a more generic warehouse based software. Supplemented by a lot of spreadsheets and separate manual processes. The problem wasn't necessarily that any one of those processes didn't work, it was that information was spread out and people were working from different places.
What attracted us to Breww was the idea of having production, inventory, sales, customers, invoicing and deliveries all tied together. Rather than having production know one thing, sales know another and accounting having to piece it all together afterwards, we wanted one system that could act as the source of truth.
AGLC
What did you need Breww to get right on the AGLC side before you were comfortable going live?
AGLC was probably the biggest thing for me. Alberta isn't a market where you can just create a wholesale price and send an invoice. You've got AGLC markup, taxable volumes, container recycling fees, deposits, Direct versus CLS products and the reporting side of it.
For me, those things had to be right before I was comfortable relying on the system.
Breww investigated it, made changes to the software and even worked directly with AGLC's pricing team to figure out some of the Alberta-specific edge cases for example.
How does Breww handle AGLC pricing, markup and reporting for you now? What used to take longer or need more manual checking before?
We can manage our AGLC and CLS products and pricing within Breww, and Breww does the calculations around markup, taxable volume, recycling fees, deposits and the other components that ultimately make up the wholesale price. It also gives us the ability to flag when something doesn't reconcile properly rather than just assuming the number is correct.
On the reporting side, you’re able to track on customer level which SKUs they purchase through Liquor Connect, timing, cadence, etc. This provides loads of valuable information for our sales team.
The biggest difference is probably the amount of checking. Previously you're looking at product lists, invoices, spreadsheets and AGLC information and trying to make sure they all agree. Now most of that lives inside the same workflow.
I still believe you should understand the numbers rather than blindly trusting software, but Breww takes a huge amount of the manual work out of it.
If another Alberta brewery is worried about AGLC compliance when picking software, what would you tell them?
I would tell them that the integration is build on compliance. Without a valid license # or Albertan address for instance, you’re not able to add products to an order. Sample orders are tracked separately for compliance reasons also and there are many more examples I could give.
Day to day in Breww
Which parts of Breww do you and the team use most, day to day?
Probably sales orders and invoicing first, followed by inventory, deliveries, production and customer management.
Our sales team can enter an order, the warehouse can see what needs to be picked, deliveries can be planned from it, inventory is affected by it and accounting ultimately has the invoice and payment information. Production is also using Breww for batches, packaging and stock movements.
We integrate it with QuickBooks Online as well, so Breww has really become the operational system in the middle of the business.
We've also recently started rolling out the Breww Trade Store, which gives wholesale customers the ability to place their own orders directly into the same system rather than emailing, texting or calling an order in.
Is there a specific feature or workflow that's made the biggest difference to how you operate?
For me, it isn't necessarily one feature. It's what happens after somebody enters an order.
That order can go from sales to the warehouse, into delivery planning, onto an invoice, through inventory and eventually into accounting without everybody having to recreate the same information.
That sounds simple, but once you have multiple salespeople, production, a warehouse, drivers and accounting all touching the same order, removing those handoffs and duplicate entries makes a big difference.
The ability to actually look at the business from one system is probably the biggest benefit.
Any numbers you can share on volume or scale, invoices, deliveries, batches per month, number of users, anything that shows how much the business runs through Breww?
A solid number I can share, is we deducted our spreadsheets by 4 or 5 now that we have Breww, that’s self explanatory ;-).
Trust and results
You referred Lookout Brewing to Breww. What made you comfortable recommending us, and what did you tell them it would change?
I was comfortable recommending Breww because by that point I had actually dealt with both sides of it. I'd seen what worked well, but I'd also been through some of the problems and worked with Breww's team to resolve them.
I think that's more meaningful than recommending software because everything happened to work perfectly on day one.
What would you say to another brewery that's on the fence about switching?
Switching systems is never fun, especially when you're moving years of products, customers, inventory and processes over. There is going to be work involved.
But I would look at how much time you're currently spending maintaining separate spreadsheets, entering the same information twice, fixing inventory discrepancies, checking invoices and trying to get different departments onto the same page.
I'd also say don't try to implement everything at once. Get the core workflows right, make sure your products and pricing are right, get your team comfortable with it and then keep building on it.
Any single moment or example that sums up why Breww has worked for Snake Lake?
Probably the AGLC implementation. We found some very specific Alberta pricing discrepancies and could have easily been told, "That's just how the system works." Instead, Breww dug into our examples, changed calculations in the software and worked with AGLC to understand the pieces that weren't clear.
If I had to put it into one quote:
"What gave me confidence in Breww wasn't that they got every Alberta edge case right on day one. It was that when we found something that wasn't right, they actually dug into it and fixed it. Today, Breww has become the system we run the brewery through."