This is a part of a continuing series of Q&As with members of the brewing community from across the US. Brewer Magazine will share business and personal insights from Brewmasters, Head Brewers, Brewing Managers, Sales Directors, QCQA Managers and others each weekend to help you get to know each other better in the industry and learn more to better develop your own brand.
Ryan Bruchey, Director of Brewery Operations, TailGate Brewery — Nashville
BREWER: What has been your biggest operational focus recently, and how has it improved efficiency or team performance?
BRUCHEY: Q4 and Q1 we were focusing heavily on brewhouse efficiency and overall yield — increasing our average batch yield across all production by 8% — including some process improvements that increased our pub batch yields by double digits Now our focus is residency. With distribution volume increasing so much, we’re retaining one of our core operating principles — fresh beer always. We don’t run our distributing partners longer than 30 days on hand so every TailGate beer you’re drinking in Tennessee is our freshest foot forward. Working backwards from that true north as well as our just-in-time manufacturing model, we’re packaging tanks faster. The whole team is dialing in on — Goes in on X day, comes out X days later, ships immediately.
BREWER: What’s one change you implemented in the past year that made a noticeable difference in day-to-day operations?
BRUCHEY: As simple as it may seem, a daily five minute ‘huddle’ for the production team. Every day at noon — Cellar Lead, Brewer Lead, Head Brewer, QC Manager, and Warehouse Manager check in. The topic is generally what are the roadblocks/obstacles we’re facing, is everything still on track to achieve our goal? Recently with the focus on residency, we’re looking at Cellar and QC for the latest fermentation data to ask “are we still on pace to crash and transfer on X day to hit the goal?” It’s created a lot of cohesion and helps us define a clear team-wide goal. The huddle helps build a lot of empathy for other positions and roles. Similar to your FOH and BOH understanding each other’s challenges, no one is on an island here!
BREWER: How are you approaching team development and retention in today’s brewery environment?
BRUCHEY: Task variety and opportunities for growth. We want passionate craft beer fans that want to grow in the industry. We structure the department so that there’s upward mobility. One person could start with no experience and learn substantial beverage manufacturing skills at TailGate. The task variety in our beverage portfolio recruits as well as develops and retains for us. Not every day is doing the same thing. We may double turn on our pub system where the first turn is our Nashville Sweet Tea brand and the second is a Slow Bier: German Pilsner. The next day, that same brewer may be flipping a 200bbl fermenter, running a centrifuge, and then batch pasteurizing some TailGate Cider. With the variety of our portfolio and the variety of processes to execute said portfolio, there’s a lot of professional growth here for anyone interested in brewing. We’ve invested more in our leadership over the last year with more opportunities to grow into leadership roles in production. Positions like Lead Brewer II, a kind of ‘assistant head-brewer’ analogous role didn’t exist a year ago. Now there’s another avenue to promote/grow into!
BREWER: What metrics or indicators are you paying closest attention to right now when evaluating success in your role?
BRUCHEY: Quality is a foregone conclusion that when it’s packaged it is excellent so our biggest indicators are yield and residency. The only thing that matters is filling orders and meeting demand. Residency is the loudest component to us currently
BREWER: What’s a challenge specific to your role that others in similar positions may also be facing, and how are you working through it?
BRUCHEY: Everyone talks about rising costs — that’s raw materials and packaging materials prices — so we have to constantly re-evaluate our source of supply. There’s plenty of margin to be earned back in procuring intelligently and hunting for bulk discounts. Freight and gas prices are likewise skyrocketing and there’s many vendors passing along surcharges. That’s a bigger consideration than ever before. We may buy up to the next volume discount level not because we want to hold more inventory or realize a much lower per-unit cost, but because it’s better to spread that freight expense across more units. The harder and louder truth is for all the effort spent in procurement, if you increase your final finished goods yield you can stomach more of the creeping COGS than you realize!
READ MORE: Why TailGate Roped All its Lagers Into a Collective Brand
BREWER: Looking ahead, what are you hoping to improve or refine within your department this year?
BRUCHEY: We are so grateful to have the kind of demand we have right now, the main focus is refining residency but not just in the tank — in reducing the time it takes to fill orders. That’s smarter procurement, and faster processing post-package. We just commissioned a Flash Pasteurization System (FPS) to increase our shelf stability and decrease the load on our batch units. We’re really looking forward to realizing those efficiencies and re-imagining some of our production workflows. Putting an FPS in allows us to ship product faster!
