Turning around a struggling brewpub

First, find out what kind of trouble

Brewpubs struggle for a handful of reasons. Each needs different medicine. The beer may not be good enough or consistent enough. Costs may be higher than the price can carry. The location or concept may draw too few people. Or cash may have run so low that every decision is short term. Most troubled sites have two of these at once.

Do not start by changing the menu or the decor. Start by finding out which problem you have. Our guide to why breweries fail covers the common patterns.

Week one: stop the bleeding

Some fixes cost nothing and take days.

• Taste every beer on tap with the head brewer. Pull anything stale, oxidised or infected. Serving a bad beer to recover its cost loses regulars who never come back.
• Clean every draught line. Check serving temperature and gas pressure at each tap.
• Compare litres drawn from tanks with litres billed for the last month. A large gap is cash you can recover at once.
• Freeze non-essential spending until there is a plan.

Talk to the team in the same week. Brewers and bar staff usually know where things are going wrong long before the owner does. They are rarely asked. Ask them directly what they would fix first, then check their answers against the numbers.

Fix the beer before the marketing

Marketing a poor beer brings more people in to be disappointed. Before any promotion, the house beers need to be right and the same every time.

That means a specification for each beer, a fermentation schedule that is actually followed, a diacetyl check before crash cooling and a sensory sign-off before any tank goes on sale. In an Indian summer it also means a cold room that holds temperature. A walk-in fighting 40 °C outside with a perished door seal will warm your kegs and run the compressor round the clock. Our guide to a quality system for a small brewery sets out a lean version a small team can run.

Cut the tap list and rework the numbers

A struggling brewpub often carries too many beers for its volume. Each one ties up a tank and goes stale slowly. Use sales data to keep the beers that sell and drop the rest. The freed tanks let you brew the best sellers more often and serve them fresher.

Then rebuild the cost per litre from current invoices, check each beer's margin against its menu price and look at labour rostered against covers by hour. Many sites are staffed for Saturday night on a Tuesday afternoon.

Check menu prices against what nearby venues charge for comparable beer, but resist the urge to cut prices on a beer that is not yet right. A cheaper bad pint is still a bad pint.

Run it on weekly numbers

A turnaround succeeds or fails on whether the owner sees the right figures every week: litres sold, the drawn-against-billed gap, beer margin, covers, spend per head and quality checks done. Our guide to weekly numbers for brewpub owners lists them. Review them with the brewer and floor manager every week, in the same order, with one or two named actions at the end.

Expect the quick fixes to show within weeks. Reputation comes back more slowly. Regulars who left over a sour pint need a reason to try again. That reason is beer that is reliably good every time they visit. Tell them it has changed, then let the beer prove it.

When to bring in outside help

Owners usually know something is wrong long before they know what. An outside look helps when the team is too close to the problem, when the brewer and the owner disagree about the cause or when nobody has time to measure anything because every day is a firefight.

Be honest about the end point too. Some sites cannot be saved in their current form. The rent may be wrong for the footfall, or licensing and excise costs in that state may leave no margin at the price the area will pay. A good turnaround plan says so early, before more money goes in.