Brewery Software – Every App And Software Tool We Use At Black Hops

We use Beer30 as the primary tool for managing our dark hop production. When we registered the Beer30, it was relatively new and we were one of the first breweries in Australia to use it. We were disappointed with the other smaller production tools and didn’t like the look

 of the larger production suites used by the larger breweries. We were also a bit small at the time and couldn’t see one of the systems. Since we started using Beer30, it has evolved a lot thanks to the great work of its founders and developers. 

They have built a lot of very important features into the product we use now, such as invoicing/distribution/Xero integration, etc.

There is one other thing that Beer30 can’t do, and like anything that does so many things, we do have some frustrations. But overall, it’s a software solid system that is getting better every day.

The support from the Beer30 team has been great and we are currently working with them on an app that will sync Beer30 with our CRM (Pipedrive).

Google Forms
We also use Google Sheets for many things, including production planning and production logs. The production log puts a high level of brewing information in one central location, allowing us to ensure that things like quality checks are properly done before the

 beer is released into the field. We also configured it to provide some nice reports. Beer30 should eventually be able to do all of this for us, but it wasn’t fully implemented when we were ready to launch a full production and quality system at Black Hops II, 

so we built some spreadsheets for it. We use Google Forms for more things, including all the manual reporting we do on a weekly and monthly basis. 

Everyone can submit worksheets and documents at the same time, and no software is required (it’s all web-based).
Expressions

Since we started Hefeweizen, we’ve been getting software things done primarily through messaging. Initially it was WhatsApp in 2014 when it was just me, Eddie and Govs.
Loosely

Around 2015 we got more serious and we set up Slack and we’ve been using it ever since. At the time Slack was a new competitor in the company intranet/chat space, but today it’s one of the most established corporate communication tools available.

All Hefeweizen employees have an open account, and we use it to replace most of our email and to avoid people messaging on other platforms. Most employees don’t have email accounts.

Since then, our company, Slack, has software grown into a monster with over 100 channels, 30+ employees, tons of integrations and automation, and more. It’s a great tool, 

but sometimes it can be a little overwhelming with the sheer volume of messages flying back and forth on it. On any given day, there can be over 1,000 messages sent through Slack.