Managing brewing club inventory?

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DevilsCreekBrewing

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Location
Cambridge Ontario
The physical/ digital tracking of it I'm ok with. What I want to know from you all, is how do you manage the inventory when everyone has paid to acquire it, and doesn't/ can't brew with the club all the time.

My group currently has about 600 Lbs of grains, and 15 Lbs of hops. I am thinking to take this as a starting point, and calculate the cost per batch, which is then paid per brewday, moneys put towards further buys. But, I`m not too sure this is a fair and reasonable way to approach it. Hopefully this is a situation you have resolved already.
 
Brew club in Cambridge?!? I like the sounds of that!

Guess you could use a log book of sorts, who showed up to brew, who didn't. Maybe keep a few bags of grain hidden for those not able to make it on a given brew day. If you have a list of who paid what, divvy up everyone's grain into separate bags and Tag them?
 
Well, you know how many people paid, and how much raw material you have so divide the amount of material by the amount of people that paid, and then separate it into said amount of supplies. It's as fair a way to do it as I can think of, you get what you pay for essentially.

For example, your brew club is 5 people, and the total cost of all purchased ingredients is 200$

everyone pitches in 40$ and then once you have the materials you divide them into 5 batches of equal size. Everyone has the same amount and everyone paid the same amount. Even if they can't brew on the same day the members ingredients are still put to the side for them, and they can pick them up at the earliest convenience
 
Seems like a brew-log with 4 columns:

Brew Date - Name - # of grain used - hop oz. used

Everybody should know in advance what they paid for (i.e. if they all paid an equal amount, divide total grain weight by # of people) and can easily add up their brew days to see if they've hit their limit. If people share a brew day and split a batch, they can just divide the grain bill (weight) for that day between the total number of people brewing...
 
I think it should depend on how the money is acquired. If the money is collected like EricR mentioned, where each person pitches in enough to get a 5 gallon batch, then it's alright to save his materials for him to pick up later.

On the other hand if it's a dues thing, it might be different. If the person pays dues and that money is used to buy ingredients, then people shouldn't really have a "reserved portion". The community pot is for the community, whether or not you take part in the brewing is up to you. It's like when you have a membership to a gym, you don't get reimbursed just because you decided not to show up. They don't reserve a treadmill for you either. If you don't want to use the equipment, somebody else will.

That's my opinion anyway. If you want to run the club like a credit union where each person gets a share, you can do that too but it's a little less conducive to a gemütlichkeit feeling which is what brewing is all about in my opinion.
 
Thanks for the ideas all. We are really just starting to acquire large amounts of consumable supplies, so this hasn`t been an issue for us in the past, and I want to be able to suggest some things to the guys, so that it never gets to be an issue.

I want to try to make it so no one feels like they have put in more than the rest, or that they are getting shorted somehow. I want us to be brewing together in 20 years. :)
 
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