Built for Brewery owners.
Grounded in real Brewery business owners. No generic web guessing. Honest when the library does not cover your question.
What Brewery owners ask about
Pricing your work
How to price jobs, raise rates without losing customers, and stop underbidding.
Hiring and firing
When to hire your first employee, how to spot the wrong one fast, and what to pay.
Handling customers
Tough calls, refund requests, reviews, and the customers worth firing.
Local marketing
What actually drives calls in your zip code. Less guesswork than Google says.
Cash flow
Reading your numbers without an MBA. Knowing when you can actually breathe.
Daily decisions
The stuff a coach charges $500/hr for. Available at 6 AM before the first job.
How the money works in brewery
What actually decides your year
Taproom margin is triple distribution margin. Capacity planning, tank turns, and self-distribution decisions define the business.
- What the customer is buying
- one ticket, one cover
- Business model
- Food and beverage service
- Your hard ceiling
- Seats times turns times hours, and how much a kitchen can plate at once.
You live inside prime cost: food plus labor as a percentage of sales. Everything else is rounding. Small waste and small overpours do not feel like anything, and they add up to your entire profit. Menu mix - what people order, not what you price - is the strongest lever you have.
Run the numbers
Prime cost decides whether you eat
One month at a small independent.
| Sales | $118,000 |
|---|---|
| Food + beverage cost | $36,600 (31%) |
| Labor including your own draw | $42,500 (36%) |
| Rent, utilities, everything else | $31,000 (26%) |
Prime cost = 31% + 36% = 67% → net = 100% − 67% − 26% = 7%
At 67 percent prime you are alive but thin. Every point you pull out of prime is about $1,180 a month of profit. Two points from waste and scheduling is a raise you do not need a price increase to get.
Figures are illustrative benchmarks to show the method, not a quote or a promise. Put your own numbers in the same structure - that is the point.
Numbers to watch
The five numbers that tell you the truth
If you only track revenue, you find out about a bad quarter after it is over. These are leading indicators.
Prime cost
Under 65% (60% is strong)
The one number that predicts survival.
Food cost by category
Weekly, not monthly
Monthly counting finds problems a month too late.
Sales per labor hour
Track by daypart
Tells you where the schedule is wrong.
Menu mix contribution
Know your top 10 by profit dollars
Popular and profitable are different lists.
Comps, voids, and waste
Under 2% of sales
Where theft and sloppiness hide.
Where the money leaks
Common profit leaks in brewery
None of these show up as a line item. They show up as a busy year with nothing left at the end of it.
01
Costing the menu once and never again
Your recipe costs changed. Re-cost your top ten items quarterly and adjust portion or price.
02
Scheduling by habit
Build the schedule from last year's sales by hour, not from who wants shifts.
03
Free food and unlogged comps
Untracked comps are indistinguishable from theft on a P&L. Every comp gets a reason code.
04
Menu too long
Every extra SKU is more inventory, more waste, more ticket time. Cut the bottom 20 percent by profit dollars.
05
Third-party delivery priced like dine-in
A 30 percent commission on a 12 percent margin item is a loss you are advertising for.
First 90 days
A plan you could start Monday
Three windows, in order. Do not skip the first one - you cannot fix a number you have never measured.
Days 1-30
Count things
- Weekly inventory on your top 20 cost items.
- Re-cost your ten best sellers with today's invoices.
- Start a comp and waste log with reason codes.
Days 31-60
Fix the mix
- Rank menu items by profit dollars and by popularity, then cut or re-engineer the bottom.
- Reprice or re-portion anything under target margin.
- Set delivery pricing separately from dine-in.
Days 61-90
Schedule to sales
- Build schedules from hourly sales history.
- Set a sales-per-labor-hour target per daypart.
- Cross-train so a slow shift can run one lighter.
Hiring ladder
Who to hire, and when
Hire on a trigger, not on a feeling.
Reliable opener / closer
You are opening and closing the same day
The first hire that gives you your life back.
Kitchen lead
Consistency slips when you are not on the line
Buy standards, not just hands.
Shift manager
Two dayparts, seven days
Someone has to own the money count when you are not there.
GM
You want a second location or a life
Do not open location two without one first.
Say it out loud
Raising menu prices without an apology
Costs are up and regulars will notice.
"New menus go up Monday - most items move 50 cents to a dollar."
"Beef and dairy are up double digits this year. I would rather adjust prices than shrink the plate or change the supplier."
"If a regular asks, tell them exactly that. No apology, no long story."
Seasonality
Weekly and seasonal swings are extreme and predictable. Build a rolling 13-week sales history and staff to it; most food businesses fail in a slow month they had every reason to see coming.
FAQ
Common questions from Brewery owners
- Is Ask a Shop Owner actually built for Brewery businesses?
- Yes. Ask a Shop Owner is grounded in a curated library of real business owner experience that includes Brewery owners and adjacent trades. It will tell you when a question is outside what the library covers.
- How is this different from asking ChatGPT about my Brewery shop?
- ChatGPT pulls from the generic web and guesses confidently. Ask a Shop Owner only answers from a vetted library of real shop owners and refuses when the library does not cover it.
- Do I need to be technical to use it?
- No. You ask a question the way you would ask a friend at the bar. Plain English. Answers cite who they are pulled from.
- What does it cost?
- There is a free tier to try it. See the pricing page for current plans.
Ready to stop guessing?
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