The making of a beer calendar
Every year around this time, craft breweries from around the country release their beer calendars and us beer geeks get to make plans for all of the great beers we’ll be drinking in the coming year.
On the surface, that beer calendar looks like a fairly simple part of our business – and that’s understandable since brewing beer is what we do. The truth is that assembling a yearly beer calendar is actually one of the more complex processes that a craft brewery goes through on an annual basis. As complicated as it is, it’s extremely important to plan things out so that our distributors and retail partners can map out their business plans and so that our production team can secure raw materials like hops, malt and specialty ingredients.
As we release our 2016 beer calendar, we thought we would share a little bit of the #beergeekery that we consider as we assemble all of the pieces of the annual announcement.
If there’s one thing to know about the beer calendar process, it’s that it takes a team. The team that puts together the beer calendar at Dogfish includes people from Brewing, Sales and Marketing. So just how does each world aid in this planning process ... ?
Brewing
Well, they gotta be on the team because they’re the ones that will be brewing the beer, right? Yep, the Brewing team works closely with Sam throughout the year to brew research and development (we call it “R & D” in the biz) batches at our Rehoboth Beach brewpub. Sometimes, those beers stay “Brewpub Exclusives” and sometimes those beers are test batches for potential production beers.
The brewing team also has to put a lot of thought into managing ingredients, tanks and yeast strains. They make sure we have enough of the right hops to brew with, yeast to pitch into wort, clean fermentation tanks, dealing with the complexities of moving beer into brite tanks or maybe even beer into wood tanks. Then there’s the whole puzzle of packaging schedules which can be dictated by shipping dates and/or when we need to clear out tank space for additional beers that are coming down the line.
Case in point ... our Punkin Ale causes one of the bigger production complications every year. Even though Punkin is a seasonal beer and only available three months a year, it’s our 3rd or 4th largest volume beer. Needing to brew so much of one beer in the middle of the year is sort of like our rat in the snake. We need a bunch of our tanks for Punkin, but we can’t run out of our staples like 60 Minute, Namaste and Indian Brown Ale. That takes some planning and management and can be a bit of a “tankless job”.
Another complication that the beer calendar team needed to consider this year was spacing out our Wood-Aged series appropriately. In 2016, we have four beers in the Wood-Aged series set for release: Immort Ale, Red & White, Palo Santo Marron and Burton Baton. Since we only have two Palo tanks and three Oak tanks and only so much beer can be aging on wood at any given time, the production team needs to be thoughtful on where those beers are placed on the calendar.
Sales
As the people who work with our distributor partners day in and day out, the Sales team’s primary role is to decide on how much of each beer we brew. Figuring out annual volume is a process that is a mix of art and science. The art comes from being on the front lines of communication and having a gut intuition on which brands might be the breakout star of the coming year. The science is looking at trends on how current brands have been performing and also looking at industry trends on where the industry is heading.
Marketing
The Marketing folks are the people that ask annoying questions and make impossible requests of the production team. Just kidding (kind of). Marketing’s main role on this team is to be the voice of people like you! The Marketing team manages our social media accounts so they’re answering emails, Tweets and Facebook messages on a daily basis. Who better to provide some input on which beers we should dust off, bring out of hiatus, or which brewpub exclusives might make it to the big show and be elevated to a production batch at our Milton brewery?
Marketing also helps facilitate the naming of beers. The key word there is facilitate. Most people think the folks in the Marketing department are the only ones that sit around and dream up names or that maybe even hire people to come up with names. Here at Dogfish, Sam has historically been the creative spark behind our off-centered names. That task is becoming more and more difficult because there are so many great beers out there. We always try to come up with names that are unique, memorable, off-centered and not derivative of other beer names. Sam is still very involved in this process, but the Marketing team will often collect a list of possibilities, check with our legal team to see if our favorites are available, and get feedback from our co-workers to see which ones we like best. Namin’ ain’t easy. In fact, at the time of this blog post being posted, we’re still in the process of finalizing our new Winter Seasonal’s name. We’re close, but we need to figure out a couple small things before we share it with all you fine people.
We hope you are as excited about our 2016 beer calendar as much as we are. We have some great new beers coming this year and the return of some old favorites like Squall and World Wide Stout. Let us know which beers you’re looking forward to!