Keeping recipes and quality steady when your head brewer leaves

Why one departure can change every beer

In a small brewery the head brewer often designs the recipes, runs brew days, manages yeast, decides when beer is ready and tastes everything before it goes out. Much of that lives in habit rather than writing. When they leave, the next brewer works from incomplete notes and fills the gaps with their own habits. Regulars notice within a month.

The best time to prepare is long before anyone resigns. The second best time is the day the resignation lands.

What to capture before they go

• Recipes in full: grist by weight and percentage, water treatment, mash schedule, boil timings, hop additions by weight and by alpha acid target, yeast strain and pitch rate, fermentation profile, conditioning and carbonation.
• Beer specifications: target original and final gravity, ABV, bitterness, colour, pH, carbonation and a short sensory description.
• Brew logs for recent batches, so the next brewer can see actual numbers and not only targets.
• SOPs for brew day, cleaning, yeast handling, packaging and quality checks. Our guide to writing brewhouse SOPs shows how.
• Supplier details: malt, hops, yeast, chemicals, spares and service contacts.
• Equipment quirks: the valve that sticks, the tank that runs warm, the pump that needs priming.

Protect the yeast

Yeast is often the hardest thing to replace. A house strain that has been repitched for many generations may have drifted from the original culture. The beer now depends on that drift. Before the head brewer leaves, make sure you know the strain's source, its current generation and how it is stored. Bank a fresh culture with your supplier or a lab if you can. If the strain is a commercial one, record the supplier code so you can buy it fresh.

Add the things nobody thinks to write down because they are done by feel. How long does the brewer actually rest the mash before lautering? At what gravity do they start the diacetyl rest? How do they decide a beer is ready to crash? What do they taste for before releasing a tank? Sit with the brewer for an afternoon and ask these questions one by one, writing the answers into the recipe sheet as you go. It is slow work. It is also the part that matters most.

Plan the handover

If there is a notice period, use it. Have the departing brewer brew each core beer at least once with the incoming brewer or assistant beside them. Agree a handover checklist and tick items off together. Ask them to taste current tanks with the team and describe what good looks like for each beer.

If the departure is sudden or difficult, rely on the records you have and bring in temporary support to bridge the gap. Our guide to hiring your first head brewer covers recruitment for the replacement.

Hold the beer to specification

For the first few months after a change, compare every batch against its specification and against retained samples brewed by the previous head brewer. A triangle test shows whether the new batch is distinguishable from the old one. If a difference appears, go back to the recipe and the logs before anyone starts improving things.

The new brewer will want to make changes. Some may be improvements. Agree that changes to core beers happen deliberately, one at a time and with tasting against the old version.

Retain samples from the last few batches brewed by the departing brewer, stored cold and labelled. They give the new brewer something real to taste against, which is far more useful than a written description of what the beer should be.

Ask the departing brewer to list what they would watch most closely in each beer: the step most likely to go wrong and the first sign that it has.

Make the brewery less dependent on one person

Cross-train at least one other person on every core task. Keep recipes and SOPs in a shared place owned by the business, not on a personal phone. Make sure employment contracts are clear that recipes developed at work belong to the brewery. Take legal advice on the wording. Review the documentation once a year so it stays current.

In consulting work we often see owners discover that their recipes were never written down only when the brewer who knew them has already gone. A few days of documentation work now avoids months of drift later.