Brewing Schedule Help

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lazerwhipbrewer

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Hey gang,

I am a student in a brewmaster program and we have been given a project where we have to 'design our own brewery'. One of the steps is to figure out a brewing schedule for the year. Our imaginary brewery is 2500HL/year and we produce 1/3 lager, 1/3 ale, and 1/3 wheat beer. the lager production is 3 weeks, ale production is 2 weeks, and wheat production is 10 days. we brew 50 weeks out of the year.

anyone have any suggestions on how we might work out a brewing schedule? any help is greatly appreciated.:mug:
 
Taking a rough stab at it, I used excel in a method similar to a GANTT chart. It basically lays out timelines for each beer. Your X-axis or Columns would be each day of the year, and your Y-axis Rows would be the number of fermenters. The size of your brewhouse will determine how many days per week you need to brew to reach the 2500HL per year. But you will also need to take into account how many fermenters you have.

For example If you brew all three beers on days 1,2,3, and you only have 3 fermenters you will not be able to brew again until the wheat is done, and then you have to decide what you need to brew next in order to meet your demands. Its kind of a balancing act, but if you can get a "cycle" of 2-3 months where you have brewed each beer (in your case an equal number of times) then you could just copy that schedule to get you to a year.

Good Luck
 
I think ProBrewer would be a better place to find people to do your homework for you. Shouldn't you have learned this already?
 
You aren't going to be anywhere near accurate until you see what consumption tells you.

My schedule is roughly as follows;

6bbls of Amber every other month
6bbls of Porter every other month
3bbls of Hefe twice a month
Specialties are brewed in 3bbl batches and average 2-3 a month sometimes more.

Consumption dictates your brewing schedule far more than what you would like to see sell even if you are a distribution brewer.

I have also brewed 62 total batches since April and there are weeks that I am brewing 5 days straight and others where I don't brew at all. You put something hot on tap and you could be brewing a lot sooner than you think, brew too much and you run into storage issues so it is a balancing act as tsb22 has said.
 
Thank you for all your helpful insight! This is my first time ever posting to a forum. I am at Niagara College Canada in the brewmaster and Brewery operations management program in my first semester. So to the person who asked "shouldn't you have learned this already" the answer is definitely no. I have 7 courses this semester and so far learning about the isomerization of alpha acids, malt analysis and how important diastatic power is, how to taste and smell diacetyl, and actually brewing 8 hours a day has been more important than learning how to make a brewing schedule. I have always been afraid to ask questions on forums like this because of comments like that. I just want to learn as much as possible and not be scared to ask questions. The program is designed to teach young people who might not have much experience yet how to brew. It covers a lot as you can imagine.
 
Dont worry about the nay-sayers, there will always be people who say negative or discouraging things, but I think there are plenty of forum users out here who have learned more about brewing from the forums than they ever would from books or just on their own and are wanting to give back. Welcome to HBT!

Daksin does have one good point of looking to Probrewer for questions involving actually running a brewing buisness. There are alot more professionals out there on Probrewer, although I find this community a little more responsive sometimes.

Sounds like you are learning alot up there in Canada, good luck with your program, I wish I could take a few years off work and do what you are doing.

Back to your original question again, Nightshade has it right from a Real Life perspective, its hard to layout some ideal sales plan & actually execute it, but from the sounds of it, your HW is a little more hypothetical.

I was able to grab a screen shot of my excel layout for a brewing schedule that I put together just to get some idea of monthly costs for my buisness plan.

schedule-57561.bmp


Each color represents a different beer, they are also labeled as to which fermenter/brite tank they are doing into. the boil kettle rows represent actual brew days, where as the fermenter and brite tank rows represent a place holder for where beers can "slot" into.

As I went through the days weeks, it started to get a little complicated as far as lining up brew days with open fermenters and open brite tanks. But this was what dictated how often I could brew, because in the real world you want 0days down time for your fermenters and brites (ie always full of something) so that you can maximize your output. Although you will notice, mine are not always full of something, if i could afford more fermenters or brites, my production values would def go up.

Hope this helps, or at least gives you a better picture of what I was talking about.
 
Thanks so much tsb22!! very helpful! and thanks for the encouraging words! we all need that in life in general and especially when we're studying hard!
cheers!
 
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