OnTap Magazine

G oing pro as a brewer is a slow, multifaceted journey. In the last issue of On Tap (summer 2020) I shared my experiences in building up basic brewing skills as a homebrewer, refining those skills and defining a brand. Brewing beer on a grand scale is the next step. For me, the ideal would be to build my own brewery all decked out in sparkling stainless steel. Unfortunately, this route requires huge capital and a significant investment of time. The wait for licensing approvals alone has tripped up more than one aspiring brewer. The second option is brewing under contract with a brewery that has already invested the time and money in setting up their own shiny facility. Along with the production of your beer, this model includes all the necessary licensing requirements meaning you don’t have to spend months on end completing increasingly confusing forms and waiting for a positive response. Fortunately, there are plenty of breweries offering a contract option, each with a service as unique as your nascent brand. CHOOSING THE RIGHT MODEL The first and most comprehensive model is a full turnkey service where the brewery assists you throughout the process from recipe development through to brewing and packaging. This model gives you the freedom to focus on the marketing and distribution of the beer. If you already have an award-winning recipe with which you’ve cleaned up at all the homebrewing competitions, you might be more interested in a model where you supply the recipe and the production brewery brews to your specifications. This is the most common model and is even utilised by some existing production breweries that have run out of capacity at their own facility. One key consideration that must stay top of mind as you look at various contract partners is their technical support in scaling your recipe. As homebrewers we are sometimes blind to how long transfers take and the impact on the final product flavour. A good contract brewing partner will help you scale your recipes in volume and time. In scaling my recipes, I developed the following rule of thumb: I worked out my malt bill with a 10% drop in mash efficiency from the brewery’s normal efficiency and worked on 90% of the volumes to the fermenters. This gave me enough flexibility to hit the required wort gravities with the option to water back the wort in the kettle, if required. KEEPING CONTROL I come from an engineering background growing up in production plants. At the top of my list of requirements in selecting a contract partner was the ability to take full ownership of the brew day, fermentation, and conditioning. From mash in to mash out, dry hopping, beer showers and the eventual heartache when you realise that you had to dump a batch of beer (by no fault of the production brewery). I found this contract partnership with At Hops End brewery in Gauteng. This is a rare arrangement as I am entrusted with very dangerous and expensive equipment by the brewery owners. Unless you are intimately familiar with industrial production facilities, I would strongly recommend one of the less hands-on contract brewing models. Regardless of the contract partner you choose, always respect the brewing equipment. The difference in scale, operational requirements and other safety concerns between your homebrew kit and a production brewery requires experienced brewers at the helm. Scars obtained from brewing are as sexy as those obtained from baking, as in totally not cool. GETTING YOUR BEER OUT THERE A secondary consideration in the selection of your contract brewing partner is the packaging solutions offered. Kegs are the most basic package offering, but this limits your distribution chain to hospitality outlets. The real differentiator is packaging in cans or bottles. Before you select one package over the other, I would complete a full trade-off study. In Gauteng, selecting cans would lock you in to using one of two production breweries that offers canning. In the Western Cape and KZN, there are mobile canning solutions, which reduce your lock-in risk. Product stability also improves with canning over bottling as oxygen pick-up is lower in cans than in bottles. As mentioned earlier, contract brewing can free up your time to focus on the marketing and distribution of your beer. Marketing is right up there with cash flow in keeping your business alive and well, which means I should probably invest a lot more time into marketing. Self-judgement aside, currently all my marketing efforts are accomplished via organic distribution on different social media platforms. I have been managing my own social media as I am still in the process of finding and defining my brand voice. If you decide to follow the same route I would as a minimum recommend The ideal would be to build my own brewery all decked out in sparkling stainless steel Quality control is crucial... Even cleaning out the mash tun is fun when you're launching your own beer brand Pause's assistant brewer Elijah Saka mashes in under Michelle's watchful eye ontapmag.co.za | Autumn 2021 | 31