Does Your Brewery Have A Capacity Expansion Plan?

For the fast growing brewery, a valuable document to have is a capacity plan that forecasts the required capacity for the brewery operations at increasing production levels over the next three to five years.   The plan shows the utilization of the existing capacity as well as when additional production capacity is required. The primary capacity areas to consider are:  

• Brew system batch size capacity in BBLs
• Number of batch cycles that can be practically done in a month 
• Fermenter capacity for the cycle time duration of the different beer styles 
• Cold room storage capacity
• Number of kegs on-hand and at customers 
• Malt silo size in pounds of malt
• Delivery capacity in terms of delivery vehicles and drivers for regions direct distributing
• Physical space to handle additional fermenters, cold storage rooms and cellar workflow
• The packaged beer inventory required to support near-term growth

At each major volume level, the plan outlines the equipment or facilities needed to be in place along with the installed capital expenditure, labor and other costs.

The following table shows the capacity requirements for selected capacity areas:

Capacity requirements at an annual run-rate production volume in Bbl