HOW WE PICK WHAT TO BREW
HELLO AGAIN DEARIES,
I often pick topics that bounce wildly between prospective audiences - a piece for experienced homebrewers this week, beer lovers who are novices in that regard the next, and professional brewers after that. This week, I thought it’d be fun to write a direct response to our regulars, who, god bless them, seem to never tire of asking when a certain beer will come back, whether we brew it once or twice a year, or whether it was an ill-fated one-off test batch in 2014.
In particular, as one of two (and a half) members on the council that decides what MacLeod brews and when, I thought I’d demystify the process, and outline both the factors that affect our decisions (which you can probably mostly guess), as well as the relative weights of these factors (which you have little chance of being able to guess).
PRACTICAL BREWING
In a perfect world, i.e. with unlimited resources and no interest in either pleasing our customers or generating enough profit to sustain even a non-profit organization, we’d probably brew something either slightly or completely new every time. While it would behoove a brewer to try to replicate a beer at least a few times, I suspect it’s a combination of subtle recipe optimization (that last one had 8% Crystal Malt? Let’s try 6%, and let’s cut back 10 IBUs and lower the SO4/Cl2 ratio while we’re at it) and pure and simple innovation that’s the most fun and educational.
But we don’t live in that perfect world, and so it’s worth mentioning that the vast majority of our brewing schedule, say, two-thirds, is pre-ordained in some way or another. This restriction can vary in its intensity, however - we’ve chosen to keep Van Ice in cans at all times, and some nine beers on draft/in cask at all times as well, but there’s often a “Hazy” slot, or a “malty British beer” slot, which we’re free to fill with one of a handful of things.
The pressures and forces that mould the brewing schedule are myriad, but they can be broadly grouped into two categories: financial concerns, and practical concerns.
FINANCIAL CONCERNS
Because our brewery isn’t state-run, we have to turn a profit, and that entails trying to pick “winning” beers, i.e. beers that either have been popular, or that we think will be popular. The former is very easy with some light data analysis - which beers have been consistently in the top five? Which one’s the worst seller for the last month? But the latter is a bit more of an art, and we get it wrong as often as we get it right. Van Ice Lime sells like hot cakes in the summer, but not so much in the winter. Hazy IPAs have proven about as popular as you’d expect (read: very), but, and the data isn’t very “clean” for the most recent, and arguably better, version, Seltzer has seemed to be middlingly popular, despite its exploding worldwide popularity as a category overall. One way to mitigate this risk is to relegate only one of our usual four canning run slots to such risky beers, a strategy which we seem unconsciously moving towards.
If it’s any consolation, reader who likes weird stuff, we only really consider popularity in absolute terms when considering new VNBC beers, since that’s the point of the brand - we don’t worry too much about whether Bitters as a class are in the top 10% of draft/cask beers; at most we’ll just not brew a new Bitter again if it sells significantly worse than our existing “stable” of Bitters. Although I joke about opening a beer bar called “Databar,” where literally every decision is based on data, and explained in weekly Version Notes that detail the changes, MacLeod ain’t no Databar.
Beyond popularity, we consider the intangible element, which is our branding. VNBC came into existence in part to allow us to justify brewing Hazies without absolutely trashing MacLeod’s identity as an International Style Brewer, lagers having shifted us away from strictly UK styles and their American derivatives (Better Days and Deal with the Devil). As such, when we brew new beers, we keep our brand in mind - the Curly Finger is an excellent example, and its insanely strong sales are a support of this approach.
Finally, we often get direct requests, most often to re-brew popular things, from what I’ll call the Marketing Department, and there’s not much to say about them - we brew what’s called for without question, it’s often just a matter of timing.
And worth mentioning before moving on is pricing and margin. Hazy IPAs are insane beers that require an ungodly amount of hops, almost or entirely none of which end up in the boil (where their alpha acids would isomerize, producing bitterness), and the yield (that is, the amount of beer we get out versus the amount of wort we put in) is often, say, 10% lower than for almost anything else. But instead of simply not brewing them, we charge more for them instead. While a hedge fund manager-turned-brewer would deliberately look for styles that are over-valued in the market (that is, Beers A and B cost the same to make, but 4-packs of beer B go for $5 more in the market, like Fruited Goses vs Fruited American Wheats, say) and brew only those, we usually just try and make the same rough dollar amount off of all of our styles, basing our prices on batch cost for the most part. You’re welcome!
PRACTICAL CONCERNS
Beyond what we determine we “should” make, there are a handful of simple practical concerns, such as:
Seasonality
Winter suggest dark, maly beers, while Summer calls for lighter lagers, and the like
St Paddy’s Day simply requires that we brew an Irish Red and have Cut & Dry on hand, no questions asked
Yeast and Hop Availability
Stephen, our head brewer, is insanely mindful of reusing yeast as often as possible, since each extra use, or “generation” as they’re called, lowers the per-batch cost of yeast. So if a lager yeast is available, we’re likely to use it
If we don’t have a certain hop, we may need to push a brew day, and Stephen has formulated recipes around insanely good, and otherwise fiendishly expensive, hops that go on sale, like Galaxy in the Knitts Collab, actually
Stephen’s comfort gambling on new recipes
Our head brewer Stephen is understandably hesitant to brew a full 15 bbl (read: large) batch of a brand new style for cans (as opposed to the lower-stakes draft), with the exception of weird Hazies for VNBC, so it’s not super likely to see, say, a brand new Golden Ale start in cans
Canning Run Makeup
This could have gone above, but it fits here too: if we have four slots for a canning run, and three have been filled with pale beers, we’ll toss in an amber or dark malty beer for the fourth. We also make sure to have something hoppy every time. This is a very Databar approach, and speaks to the increasingly crucial role that cans play in our business, and how risky it would be for our business as a whole to not have a hoppy can option
OTHER THINGS
We’ve now gone through pretty much every major point, but two more strike me as worth adding. First of all, we do choose which beers to make, at least once in a while, on what sounds fun. My pet project is getting Jackie Tar back (and were it not for this second shut down, it may by now have been ready); Stephen’s working up a special beer for our de facto electrician and handyman Denis; and we’re about to release an absolutely insane Sour Spice Milkshake IPA, which you can blame solely on Stephen’s sense of whimsy.
And to the unanswered question of when these decisions are actually made, roughly speaking we decide canning runs some 2-3 months out, and draft/cask beers maybe 4-6 weeks out (the shorter time only if there’s a sudden emergency, like demand spiking or a correction to inventory).
Oh, and I had implied I’d give you the relative weights of these factors above, so to that end, I’ll give you a similar item: a rough timeline of the planning of these can runs, as a good (read: extensively planned) example
Hypothetically, let’s say a canning run just happened, which is usually when we at least start thinking about the next unplanned run. The following roughly happens:
I use code to predict when we’ll need the next un-dated can run, based on historical averages and some guesswork (see below)
Right now we have March sketched out, so we may start by picking April’s beers
Are there holidays that month? Is it early enough for summery lagers? (No)
Has the marketing team requested something?
Broadly, if there are a lot of spots, we start with stuff we think will be popular or that the season demands, like a Hazy and Van Ice
After that, we get to pick usually one, maybe two beers in accordance with what sounds good - usually there’s no pressure to brew a particular malty beer, so that’s been a “whatever we want” slot, and for the last year, the fourth slot has often been a new VNBC experiment, like the Sour, the Seltzer, the Milkshake IPA, etc.. If that cools off, it’ll probably be a Fruited Cream Ale or a Deal with the Devil, or some other fun thing
Oh, and nitro beers? They’re a hassle and they cost extra, and they don’t always sell too well, so we usually do two at a time, maybe two or three times a year
Oh! And once or twice a year we pick cans that we think will do well in upcoming competitions - that’s usually between July and September
After we pick those, it might be on me to plug in the can amounts for a can run that’s coming up, like the February run, which I do as late as possible to ensure the highest degree of accuracy (more data is always better)
After the canning is worked out, I’ll look at how many kegs we pulled off of the beers we canned, and we’ll use that to predict when we’ll need another draft beer so that we dip under our maximum as little as possible, and those replacement beers can really be pretty much anything, though we usually lean towards semi-annual classics that we haven’t brewed in a while
For example, the cask Bitters are on a loop of three beers, as are the light lagers (Son of Leod, London Lager, Backwards in a Taxi at the moment)
Finally, every Monday, Stephen and I meet, and if my calculator says that a core beer needs brewing, we schedule it
And that’s about the whole process!
CONCLUSION
While I’m sure each brewery has a different process, and certainly places different weights on the various voices, I suspect that this is a fairly complete list. So next time you’re wondering if Coffey Time is coming back any time soon, you can run through the hurdles internally - it’s a niche beer (and thus somewhat unpopular), usually nitrogenated (requiring us to can a very similar nitro beer, further cutting into its sales), that’s highly seasonally specific. But don’t worry, unlike my beloved Shake ‘em up fries, I can all but guarantee you that we’ll keep brewing it, and that, why not, we’ll can it once in a while too.
Cheers,
Adrian “Autonomy is for the Rich” Febre
Ah, sweet optimism.