How long has your brewery been around? You've earned your stripes in the Dutch beer landscape. Your taproom draws a solid crowd and your festival presence is well regarded. Beer enthusiasts keep a steady stream of posts flowing about your craft brewery. Great free exposure on Instagram, Facebook, and the like - your brand visibility is in good shape. You may even have award certificates hanging prominently in your tasting room, won at respected beer competitions. Medals give consumers an extra reason to want your beer. And what about your local bottle shops and on-trade accounts?
Your brewery is on the right track. But there's no room for complacency.
That, at least, is the experience of Étienne Vermeulen, brewer at Kaapse in Rotterdam. Because no matter how good you are: as an SME brewery you always have to go one step further than Big Beer. There is a fundamental difference in how most consumers view the product of, say, Heineken, Bavaria, or Grolsch. If their beer at a bar doesn't meet expectations, consumers will almost by definition not blame the brewery. Something must have gone wrong in the way the beer was handled at the venue. The quality of an A-brand is beyond all doubt.
Consumers point the finger at you as a microbrewer
As a local microbrewery you always start this contest against Big Beer at 1–0 down. If your beer doesn't taste the way a consumer expects? Then something must have gone wrong on your end. Even if your cask IPA spent half an hour in full sun on the tail-lift of the wholesaler's van. Or if that nice bar struggles to keep its tap lines clean amid high staff turnover. Or perhaps fermentation wasn't quite complete when you went ahead and packaged your latest special anyway, to meet the surge in demand. In a commercial brewery, it ultimately comes down to delivering beer to your customer as promptly as possible.
Every brewery is only as good as the last beer a consumer drinks from it. If you want a fighting chance of survival as a microbrewer, there's only one option: pull out all the stops to deliver beer whose quality is beyond the slightest shadow of a doubt. Not occasionally, in a hit-and-miss fashion. But every single time.
Meeting expectations
A successful brewer knows exactly what they're doing at every stage of the production process. A successful brewer always takes that extra step to meet expectations. Beers of impeccable quality that give stockists a healthy margin because enthusiasts genuinely want to drink them. Not as a fun novelty to try once. But as a serious option for repeat purchase. Because how good is a beer you don't want a second one of?
A successful brewer keeps a close eye on every step in the production process, for every beer brewed. That means: don't guess - measure. That may not be the reason you once chose to become a professional brewer. Quality management isn't sexy. But fortunately there are tools to make sure this 'chore' takes as little time and effort as possible.
Have a chat with the people at Beer-o-Meter. They'll help you with quality control in a way that takes the least time and effort of any method out there. With laboratory-standard measurements and results in (near) real time. Results you no longer have to log yourself - they're captured and sorted automatically. So you can draw the right conclusions at a glance. And know exactly what to do. Because a successful brewer always knows what they're doing. With Beer-o-Meter, going the extra mile for optimal quality is no longer mission: impossible.