If you manage a wood cellar, you know how expensive barrel aging products can be.
Let’s identify a few of the things that go into a barrel program that cost money:
- the barrels themselves
- barrel racks
- storage space (warehouse: rent/lease or buy)
- utilities
- insurance (product and property)
- raw materials for the wort, wash, or must
- fruits and/or other raw materials added to the barrels during aging
- labor to: brew the wort/wash or de-stem and crush the grapes, ferment the wort/wash/must, prep the barrels, fill them, add stuff to them, empty them, clean them, move them around, plan what you are going to use them for, taste them, collect lab data on them, etc.
At the end of the day, no matter what size you are, directly and indirectly there is a lot of money tied up in your barrel program. You want to make sure you are able to stay on top of them. Coupled with the higher retail value of barrel aged packaged finished goods and your sales channel, each barrel you have could be worth thousands of dollars to your bottom line. If just one barrel gets “lost” and goes down the drain because it sat around too long, that is bad news.
How can Barrel-IT help manage this?
Barrel-IT was built from the ground up to get off of using spreadsheets and increase visibility of what is happening in your oak cellar. From the logistical aspects of receiving barrels off of a truck, filling them, blending them, emptying them, and reusing them, we wanted to bring new life into how you manage your barrels and know what you have, all while making it easier.
In this upcoming series of blog articles we will outline how Barrel-IT can save you time (and money) across all of our major functional areas: Inventory, Racking In, Barrel Management, Racking Out, Planning, Barrel Scoring, and tracking QC / Lab data.
Until the next post comes along, feel free to request access to our demo system or better yet, start your 30-day trial today!