Craft Brewery: Cost Per Batch, Kegs vs Bottles, and Where the Cash Freezes

«Last year we brewed 240,000 litres — our record in six years. And in November I sat over the calculator wondering where to find the money for the next batch of malt. The brewery is humming, the warehouse is packed, our beer is on tap in three bars — and the bank account is empty. Where did it all go?» — that's how Ostap, the founder of a craft brewery, opened our conversation.

If you brew craft beer, this story hurts because it's familiar. You make a great product, people snap it up, every new batch sells faster than the last. Yet there's no sense of money. As if someone opened a tap and somewhere between the fermentation tank and the shop shelf the beer turns into everything at once — malt, kegs, excise, payment terms — everything except cash in the bank.

Ostap has been brewing for six years in a regional city. He started with a 50-litre pot in a rented unit; now he has a 1,000-litre brewhouse, his own taproom, beer in kegs across the city's bars and cans on the shelves of local shops. Revenue grows every year. But peace of mind about money didn't come until this year. Here's how he found it — and exactly what he saw once he finally broke his brewery down into honest numbers.

From a Pot in a Rented Unit to 240 Tonnes a Year

Ostap is not a finance guy. He's a technologist and a bit of a fanatic: he can talk for an hour about water profiles for a specific hop and why his IPA doesn't turn bitter on the second day. For the first years everything rested on that — on flavour. The money was counted simply: whatever landed on the sole-trader card was what they'd «earned.» While the brewery was small, that seemed enough.

The trouble began exactly when growth kicked in. Distributors appeared who take kegs by the crate but pay a month later. Shops appeared that put cans on the shelf and settle up even later. Then came excise, a licence, a second fermenter, a hired brewer. Turnover grew, and clarity shrank. «The more I brewed, the less I understood where my money was,» Ostap says. The classic producer's trap: scale grows while the accounting model stays the same as it was in the garage.

Where the Money Really Flows in a Brewery

When we sat down to break the brewery into parts, Ostap saw his business for the first time not as «brew it, sell it» but as a chain in which cash freezes at every link. Let's walk through it the way we walked through it with him.

Cost Per Batch Is Far More Than Just Malt

The first question I asked: «How much does it cost to brew one batch?» Ostap named the price of malt and hops. That's the typical mistake. Because the real cost of a 1,000-litre batch is made up of at least these pieces:

• Malt — the base, the largest raw-material line.
• Hops — craft uses a lot of them, especially in a dry-hopped IPA, and they're expensive.
• Yeast and additives — not a one-off penny if you don't repitch yeast from batch to batch.
• Energy and water — mashing, boiling, cooling, CIP cleaning. Gas and electricity on a brew day are a real number almost nobody puts into the cost per litre.
• Excise — the state takes its cut of every litre, and that isn't «somewhere later,» it's part of the cost of every batch.
• The brewer's labour — the hours a person spends on a brew and its cleanup also have a price.

When we added it all up, it turned out that malt and hops were only half the real cost of a batch. The other half hid in energy, excise, yeast and labour — that is, in what Ostap simply wasn't counting in his head. He priced his beer «by the market,» not from his own cost. And on some styles, as it turned out, he was earning almost nothing.

Yield and Loss: You Pay for 1,000 Litres, You Sell 850

The second thing that pulls the ground from under a producer's feet is loss. You pour 1,000 litres of wort into the tank, but 1,000 don't reach the kegs and cans. Some goes into the trub with the yeast and hops, some to filtration and transfers, something sours or misses on flavour and gets dumped. Ostap's real yield of sellable product was about 85% — so out of 1,000 litres, roughly 850 went to sale.

Now, pay attention: you calculate cost on 1,000, but you take revenue from 850. If you divide costs by the litres you poured rather than the litres you sold, your cost per litre is understated by around fifteen percent. And every spoiled or short batch isn't just «a pity» — it's concrete money already spent on malt, hops and excise that will never come back as revenue.

«I thought I was brewing at a 40% margin. When we counted the losses and the full cost, one of my favourite styles left 12%. I was effectively paying for the right to brew it.»

Keg, Can or Tap: Three Different Businesses in One

This is where it got interesting. Ostap's litre of beer is one thing, but the money it brings is completely different depending on how it reaches the customer's throat.

• Your own tap (on-tap in the taproom) — the highest margin. No middleman, no packaging, the guest pays right away by card or cash. The money comes back the day of the sale. But volume is limited by the room and the footfall.
• Kegs to bars and distributors — a medium margin. The price per litre is lower, but the volumes are large. The downside: they pay on terms, and you have to keep a fleet of deposit kegs.
• Cans and bottles on the shop shelf — the lowest margin per litre. Because packaging is added: the can, the lid, the label, the line's work. Plus shops pay the latest and can return what didn't sell.

Every channel looks like «selling beer,» but from a money point of view these are three different businesses with different margins and, above all, completely different speeds of getting paid. Ostap was scaling distribution precisely — because that's where the volume is, because it's nice to see your beer everywhere. And distribution is exactly the slowest and thinnest-margin money there is.

The Distributor Takes Now, Pays Later

Here is where most of the answer to «where did the money go» was hiding. The distributor takes a batch of kegs today and pays in 30, sometimes 45 days. The shop — later still. So you've already handed over the beer, already paid the malt and excise on it, and the money arrives only next month. That's receivables — money owed to you that you don't have right now.

Add deposit kegs to that. A keg costs money, and for every one that went off to a bar you have, in effect, a frozen deposit sum. When the keg fleet grows along with distribution, you have enough capital sitting in metal across other people's bars to brew more than one batch. Ostap never looked at that as «my money parked elsewhere.» But that's exactly what it is.

It's the same story I wrote about separately: there's profit on paper, but no cash in the account. For a producer it's simply sharper, because between «spent» and «received» stand fermentation, the warehouse and the payment terms.

The Money Frozen in Beer and Stock

And the last link. Beer doesn't sell on brew day. A lager can condition for weeks. A batch stands in the fermenter — that's money invested that isn't working. Finished kegs and cans wait in the warehouse — also frozen capital. Plus the stock of malt and hops you buy ahead, because it's cheaper or because the supplier is far away.

Add it all up: beer conditioning + finished product in the warehouse + raw materials + deposit in kegs + distributor receivables. It turns out that at any given moment most of the «earned» money is frozen somewhere along this chain. It's the same trap as in retail, where there's profit but the cash is stuck in stock — except in a brewery the stock is still conditioning.

«I thought I had a sales problem. What I had was all my money standing in metal, in fermenters and in other people's debts at the same time.»

Life Before Finmap

Before he put things in order, Ostap lived roughly like this — and I suspect you'll recognise yourself:

• Accounting in his head and three files. One Excel was kept by the brewer, another by his wife, a third lived in Ostap's own head. It all got reconciled once a quarter, when nothing could be remembered anymore.
• Cost «by eye.» Prices for styles were set by the market. Nobody knew exactly which style fed the brewery and which was brewed at a loss.
• The till instead of profit. Money came in from a distributor — «we have money.» A malt payment is due — «we have no money.» They lived from payment to payment, never seeing the picture.
• Cash gaps every month. Regularly it worked out that a new batch and wages were due while the distributor revenue hadn't arrived yet. They plugged it from personal savings or delayed the purchase.
• Growth without the feeling of growth. Revenue bigger every year, no more money in the account. The classic «I brew a lot, but there's nothing for the next batch.»

How Ostap Put It in Order

We didn't stage a revolution. We did the boring but saving thing — brought all the brewery's money into one place and started seeing it every day, not once a quarter. Here's what specifically changed with Finmap.

All accounts and tills — in one picture. The sole-trader bank account, the taproom cash, the card terminal — everything pulls in automatically through bank integrations and auto-import. For the first time Ostap saw the real balance «across the whole business,» not just the one account he was used to checking.

Cost and channels. Every brew and purchase was logged by category: malt, hops, yeast, energy, excise, packaging. And sales were tagged by channel — tap, kegs, cans. Now Cash Flow and P&L show not «total profit» but the margin of each channel separately. It became visible that the tap feeds the business while the shop shelf barely breaks even.

Distributor receivables under control. Who owes how much and when they're due to pay — now that's a list, not an anxiety. You can see which money is already earned but still on its way.

A payment calendar. The next malt purchase, excise, wages, rent — all laid out ahead by date. A cash gap is now visible three weeks before it happens, not on the day the payment is due.

Ostap especially took to the AI advisor: you can simply ask in plain language «how much did I actually earn on kegs this month» and get an answer without digging through spreadsheets. For a technologist who dislikes bookkeeping, that turned out to matter.

The Finances Now

A few months passed. Ostap's revenue barely changed — he deliberately didn't push volume until he'd put things in order. Something else changed: he finally sees where his money is, and it stopped disappearing.

The main discovery was that same channel table he previously couldn't see at all. Here's a simplified version of how it looks:

What changed in practice. Ostap raised prices on two styles he was actually running at a loss — and the sky didn't fall, because they really were worth the money. He stopped scaling the lowest-margin shelf channel just «to be everywhere» and bet on his own tap and predictable distribution. He tightened keg deposits in his contracts and started reclaiming the metal that had stood in bars for years. And most importantly — the next batch purchase is now planned by the payment calendar, not by the principle of «the distributor paid, run and buy malt.»

The till stopped being frightening. For the first time in years Ostap paid himself a proper owner's salary without fearing there'd be nothing to pay for hops tomorrow.

«I didn't start brewing more. I started understanding what I already brew. It turned out that was enough for the money to stop disappearing.»

An insight for owners. In manufacturing, profit and cash in the account are not the same thing, and the gap between them is bigger than anywhere else. Between «I spent on malt» and «the distributor paid me» stand losses, conditioning, warehousing, keg deposits and payment terms. Count the business as one till and that gap is invisible — and every month you wonder why, with a full warehouse, there's no money for the next batch. The moment you break the brewery into channels, cost and frozen money, the fog lifts. That, in essence, is a producer's unit economics — counting not «across the business overall» but per unit of product and channel.

Order in Your Finances Matters More Than One More Brew

Money in a brewery never disappears. It freezes — in conditioning beer, in the metal of kegs across other people's bars, in distributors' debts, in malt on the shelf. While you stare at one shared till you can't see it, and it seems the problem is volume: «I need to brew more.» But break the business into channels, cost and frozen money, and it becomes clear you don't need to brew more. You need to see what you already brew.

That's exactly what order in your finances gives: not one more batch, but calm and decisions based on numbers rather than gut feeling. Try looking at your brewery in a new way with Finmap — and within a few weeks you'll see which channel actually feeds you and where your money stands frozen.