Tell us about Kingston Standard - what's the ethos behind the brewery, what do you make, and how does your team operate on a day-to-day basis?
Kingston Standard is a family owned and operated micro craft brewery in Kingston New York.
We make small batch beers using local ingredients, focussing on classic styles, stripping away to what is essential and elemental about our product. In 2024 and 2025 our beers won gold medals in the Barrel Aged Sour category at the NY Brewers Competition and the Best in Show Award: “The Governor’s Cup” in 2024. In 2025 our Kolsch received a bronze medal in the Golden/Blond Ale category.
Before you moved to Breww, how were you running production, managing your records, and keeping on top of orders and stock? What was the biggest gap in how things were set up?
Like many, we were using spreadsheets for all aspects of production, sales, and inventory. The biggest gap that Breww solved is the integration of those disparate facets of the business into a single place. This alone has cut our documentation time down substantially.
What prompted the move to Breww, and what made it feel like the right fit for a brewery of your size and setup?
For a brewery as small as we are, the scalable pricing made the real difference in our decision to give Breww a chance over other platforms.
Production is clearly central to how your team uses Breww. Can you walk us through what a typical brew week looks like with the system in place - from scheduling through to batch records, cellar management, and handovers?
Typically we will schedule batches in advance, pre-allocate ingredients according to the recipe and use “vessel plans” to let Breww outline a batch’s cellar schedule and then tweak as needed.
The vessel plan feature, in concert with the batch schedule, allows our in-house sales team to forecast packagings and know what’s coming down the pipe. Product and Raw Materials inventory management has also been extremely useful for cross department communications and streamlining our operations.
We also log cellar data using the Breww app when the batch is in process and utilize the vessel icons heavily to provide an at a glance view of batch status from the main production page.
Packaging approval criteria and Vessel Maintenance plans have been really useful method of ensuring everyone on the team knows what has been done from a quick glance at the production tab.
You're active in the Breww community, particularly around production topics. What's driven that — are there specific challenges you've worked through that you think other breweries could learn from?
I think the biggest challenge for any software in our industry is how vastly different each organizations approaches the complex task of tracking and managing data. With such breadth in operational needs, this is a big lift for a single piece of software.
We’ve been vocal in the Breww online community primarily to try and have a positive impact on the software development and hopefully see the implementation of features that will have a measurable impact on streamlining our record keeping.
As a New York State brewery, compliance and reporting is its own overhead. Has Breww helped simplify any of that, and if so, in what way?
Once you guys implemented TTB reporting capabilities - that was a huge win and took a really tedious task and made it super easy.