What Brewery Batch and Keg Tracking Software Does

Brewery batch software keeps one record that follows a beer from recipe to customer. That's the whole idea. Everything else is detail about how far each program takes it.

If you use paper and spreadsheets now, you probably keep most of these records already. What changes is the linking. One program holds them together, so a keg can be traced back to a batch and a batch back to its ingredients.

The areas these programs cover

This page draws on one maker's help guides (Breww). Other programs will be laid out differently. Here are the blocks that show up in those guides.

• Recipes and batches. What you planned to brew, and the record of what you actually brewed. The guide says a recipe entered in the program works toward "automatically maintaining traceability for your beer batches".¹
• Tanks and vessels. Which vessel holds which batch. The guide describes a code on each vessel for "adding fermentation readings".²
• Kegs and casks. Where each container is. The guide opens by saying the program has "full cask and keg tracking built-in".³

Narrow or wide

Some programs go well past the brewhouse and some stay narrow, for example on kegs only. So the first question isn't which program. It's how much of the chain you want one tool to hold. A brewery with a fussy keg problem and a tidy brew log may want only the keg part.

A useful first step is to list the records you keep today. Write down who fills in each one, how often, and where it lives. That list shows you which blocks you would want a program to cover. It also shows which ones already work fine on paper. Those can stay put. Leave them be until a real gap turns up. Don't change everything at once, because a half-moved set of records is worse than either end.

Where the records come from

The program only knows what someone tells it. A person types a reading or scans a label. If the brewhouse skips a step, the record has a gap. Software can flag a gap, but it can't fill one, so the habits of the people at the tanks and the packing line matter more than any feature list. Gaps happen.

Reading a maker's pages

Features differ, and so do plans and prices, which change often. Read the maker's own documentation for the exact fields and limits. Ask what's included in your plan before assuming a feature is.

This site describes what makers say, from their own documentation. It doesn't rank programs or say which one suits you.

Each page that follows takes one block in turn: batch records, fermentation logs and tanks, kegs, ingredient lots and packaging runs. If you're weighing the move itself, see spreadsheet or software.