I'm Matthew Spitz. I'm Lauri Spitz. And we are... (laughter) And this is Moustache Brewing!
We started home brewing in 2005.
Since day one of home brewing, there's always kind of like the day dream of
having a brewery one day. You go through
the whole process. You get the keys to
the building. You walk in the first
couple of times... Where do you even start?
The decisions never really ever go away.
How much equipment to get... How much beer
can we make? Can we really sell all this
beer? Is this actually gonna work?
When we were building out our brewery, we did as much of it ourselves as we could.
I learned how to sweat copper and do plumbing, just because if something was gonna go
wrong, I needed to know how to fix it. We
started really small. It's essentially
three big pots on a burner. That's really
all it was - and maybe altogether a
hundred kegs, because we were selling
everything out of the tasting room at
that point. We had like four/five accounts that we kind of sent a slim here and there to.
Wasn't a lot. And in the beginning we
would just write down the barcode number
on the spreadsheet and say it went to
this place or that place. As we started
sending more beer out, the spreadsheet
just became a mess. Your kegs just go
missing from accounts. That's a reality
of the business, as well. As a small
brewery owner your time is very valuable. Really the last thing you want to do
with it is trying to hunt down your kegs. So we spoke with SLG and learned more
about KegID and what it could do for us. We realized that was probably one of the
best investments that we made. We were
able to upload all of our accounts right
away. It's really taken the guesswork
out of figuring out how many kegs do we
have available? And we can just look on
the dashboard and see how many dirty
kegs do we have? How many clean and
sanitized kegs are ready to put packaged
beer in? Not too long ago our production had
grown again and we needed more kegs. We wanted to work with a partner who we've
worked with before and who we had a good relationship with. Being that quality
control is so important for us, from the
milling to the packaging, knowing that
our beer is going into our kegs that we
control is of the utmost importance for
us. So going with KegFleet to lease kegs,
knowing we're getting our own brand new
kegs that haven't been used by anyone
else, was a no-brainer for us. We didn't
really want to tie up capital and
cooperage, so the lease-to-own program with
SLG has been great for us and it's
allowed us to divert resources to other
expansion areas, such as tanks, canning lines....
disco balls... cat condos... Anytime we've
needed to add additional kegs to our fleet,
it's been really easy to work with SLG. We just need to let them know how many
kegs we need and within a couple of
days our keg show up branded and loaded
into KegID. The relationship that we
have with SLG and the Keg Pros has
really been a true partnership and
really they feel like part of our family
here. That's really a unique
relationship to have with one of our
vendors. Since the beginning, as small
business owners, we've had to make a lot
of choices. One of our really great choices was to
work with the Keg Pros at SLG. They've
really helped us grow our business and
it sets us up for success in the future.
