Triple Crossing Brewing did not shut down its barrel-aging program because the beer got worse. If anything, the Richmond, Virginia, brewery had become very good at making those beers. Its barrel-aged Stouts and Barleywines were technically demanding, carefully blended and once represented an important part of what Triple Crossing was known for.
The problem was simpler and considerably harder to solve: The beers weren’t moving enough to justify what it took to make them.
That distinction is important for other breweries evaluating their own portfolios. A product does not necessarily have to be a failure to become a poor business decision. Sometimes the harder decision is recognizing that a successful, respected or creatively satisfying program no longer fits the economics, capacity or customer behavior of the business.
For Triple Crossing, that realization eventually led the brewery to put its barrel-aging program on hold, rethink how it approaches Double IPAs and redirect some of its creative energy toward smaller, lower-risk projects.
Jeremy Wirtes, co-founder and head brewer, said the decision grew from taking a more honest look at what the program required compared with what it returned.
“It just started to kind of sit,” Wirtes said on the BREWER Podcast recently. “People would come in and get them. I’d argue, we were pretty well known for that program specifically. … But it just got to be the point where it just wasn’t really moving much in the tap room anymore, despite how good the beers were.”
That is the first difficult question for any brewery with a specialty program: Is the product actually generating enough value to warrant the resources tied up in it?
For barrel-aged beer, that calculation can be especially easy to underestimate because the costs extend far beyond ingredients. Triple Crossing was producing high-gravity beers that required multiple brewing sessions, significant fermentation time, expensive bourbon barrels and more than a year of aging. After that came blending, packaging, labeling and hand waxing.
“I don’t think we were at anything under 14 or 16 months by the time we are done with it,” Wirtes said of a barrel-aged product.
The brewery also had to deal with equipment that was effectively dedicated to the program. Triple Crossing had invested in a specialized bottle filler, and Wirtes noted the limited options available between a relatively inexpensive small-scale solution and a much more substantial investment.
That illustrates the one hard issue: unit economics are about the entire production system, not just the recipe.
You can look at a beer’s malt, hops, yeast and packaging costs and conclude that the selling price can leave an attractive margin. But that can be misleading when the beer also occupies tanks for extended periods, consumes storage space, requires additional labor and ties up equipment.
“After all that, you get that done and you stand back and look at how many people’s hands were involved in it,” Wirtes said. “You look back and realize how much you’re spending to get this done and it’s just pretty obvious how upside down we are.”
It points to a useful exercise to apply to any specialty product: Follow the beer all the way through the brewery.
How many brew sessions does it require? How long does it occupy fermentation or conditioning space? How much product is lost? How many employees touch it? Does it require specialized equipment? How much inventory must be carried? How much additional packaging labor does it require? And, perhaps most importantly, how quickly does the finished beer convert into cash?
Triple Crossing’s experience suggests that a brewery shouldn’t be satisfied with knowing the gross margin on a beer. It needs to understand the return on the brewery’s time, space, equipment and working capital. That becomes particularly important when a specialty program begins competing with products that have a clearer path to revenue.
Wirtes said Triple Crossing had reached a point where its local market was demanding more of its core beers. The brewery had been relatively late to package-beer distribution because it wanted to maintain control over its beer and focus on selling through its own three retail locations. But changes in the market eventually made that strategy harder to maintain. The brewery began increasing production of its flagship IPA, Falcon Smash, and that required more labor, tank capacity, attention and raw materials.
Wirtes described the decision as choosing to “bolster” the business rather than allowing a passion project to continue consuming resources.
“Certain things have to go the way they go in order to pay the bills and keep everyone employed and keep the place open and running,” he said. “But at the same time, we do like to express ourselves creatively and do interesting things that we think we can pull off.”
Triple Crossing was not simply discontinuing an unpopular beer. It was walking away from something it had become known for.
That makes a second hard issue: Opportunity cost.
Every brewery has finite tank space, labor, cash, storage and management attention. Allocating those resources to one beer means they are not available for something else. The question, then, isn’t necessarily whether a specialty beer makes money. The better question may be whether it produces a better return than the next thing the brewery could do with those same resources. Triple Crossing eventually discovered that adding tanks to support the needs of its local market made that trade-off increasingly obvious.
“I know in many ways the decision was pretty organic,” Wirtes said. “It became very clear quickly that we couldn’t dedicate the proper time and resources to those beers.”
Sometimes the decision doesn’t need to be a dramatic “kill or keep” meeting. A brewery can watch what happens when production schedules, sales priorities and capacity requirements change. But that also creates a warning: Waiting for a program to disappear organically doesn’t necessarily mean the brewery is making the best strategic decision. Wirtes acknowledged Triple Crossing probably could have pulled the plug earlier.
Another issue was demand and the danger of confusing enthusiasm versus actual purchasing behavior.
The brewery’s barrel-aged beers still had passionate supporters. When Triple Crossing publicly explained its decision recently, some customers strongly objected. That reaction could easily tempt a brewery to interpret social-media response as evidence that the program should continue. But there is a difference between a customer saying a beer should exist and that customer regularly buying the beer. Wirtes said the brewery’s response to the decision was largely positive, particularly from people who understood the current beer market. He also recognized that the criticism was not necessarily irrational.
“Almost none of what they said was wrong,” Wirtes said. “’You guys are really good at this and now you don’t do it anymore.’ That’s boggling. I get it. I completely get it.”
Yes, customer feedback is valuable, but it needs to be weighed against actual purchasing behavior. A brewery should listen to what customers say, but it should also examine what they buy, how frequently they buy it, how quickly it moves and what happens to the product after its initial release.
Triple Crossing saw the same dynamic in its Double IPA program. The brewery will still make DIPAs, but generally rotate them rather than putting several on simultaneously. The reason isn’t simply production capacity. When multiple DIPAs were available, the newest beer tended to cannibalize the previous release.
“The freshest one would cannibalize the previously fresh one and then things would go stagnant,” Wirtes said.
That is a useful reminder that a portfolio can compete against itself. Adding more choices does not automatically create more sales. In some cases, it simply divides demand among more SKUs, particularly when the products have similar audiences and short freshness windows.
For Triple Crossing, that led to a strategy of offering one Double IPA at a time, generally in 40-barrel batches and primarily through the taproom.
The same thinking has changed the way the brewery buys hops. As its production schedule became more controlled, Triple Crossing could better match its hop contracts to what it actually intended to brew.
“This is as tight of a control as we’ve ever had on our ordering,” Wirtes said. “It allows us to choose the varietals and the lots we want and get almost to the pound what we need.”
That is the less glamorous payoff of strategic discipline. Reducing the number of specialty beers doesn’t just create more tank space. It can make purchasing more predictable, reduce excess inventory and improve the brewery’s ability to select ingredients based on actual production needs rather than speculative future possibilities.
Wirtes acknowledged that Triple Crossing previously overcontracted hops, partly because the brewery wanted to preserve the ability to make different beers when interesting ingredients became available. The problem was that those ingredients still had to be used.
“It’s so difficult to use those hops in any meaningful way if you don’t have a program for them, especially at our size now,” he said.
The answer for Triple Crossing has not been to abandon creativity. In fact, the brewery appears to be separating creativity from scale. Its seven-barrel pilot system has become a way to experiment with unusual styles without creating the financial exposure that came with a 40-barrel packaged beer or a barrel-aged project that could take a year and a half to reach the customer.
Wirtes said the brewery has lately been producing beers such as an English Stock Ale, a Viennese Country Beer and a Scottish 60 on the smaller system. Those beers may not produce the same splash as a major barrel-aged release or Double IPA package, but they offer something arguably more useful: a relatively inexpensive way for the brewing team to remain curious.
“We’re going to be doing some incredibly interesting, if not difficult, sells on our seven-barrel pilot system,” Wirtes said. “If that doesn’t go well, I don’t have a year and a half or two years built into the most ridiculous ingredient purchase that we made two years ago.”
Instead of asking every creative idea to become a major commercial program, a brewery can create a smaller sandbox where ideas can prove themselves. The successful ones can earn more resources. The unsuccessful ones can disappear without leaving a significant amount of inventory, labor or capital stranded behind them.
Wirtes can envision a return to barrel aging, but on dramatically different terms: perhaps one or two batches a year, a more manageable 9-10% alcohol range, a more drinkable finishing profile, fewer barrels and a packaging solution that does not recreate the labor and equipment burden of the previous program.
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“If that program does return, it’s going to look really different than it did back then,” he said. “There comes a time and a place where you really got to look hard at what you’re doing, what you’re good at and what’s working versus what you want to work.”
A brewery does not need to prove that a product is bad before changing or eliminating it. It needs to understand what the product is actually costing the business, what else those resources could accomplish, whether customers are supporting it with their wallets and whether the program still fits the brewery’s current strategy.
Sometimes the smartest portfolio decision isn’t about finding the next big thing.
It is recognizing which good things no longer make sense and creating enough room to find out what might.
