Writing a crisis plan for a brewery

Plan for the incidents you can name

A crisis plan does not need to cover every disaster. It needs to cover the handful that are likely in a brewery and serious enough to hurt people, the product or the business. Most small breweries can list them in ten minutes:

• A person injured, from a burn, a chemical splash, a fall or a confined space.
• A carbon dioxide leak in a cellar or cold room.
• A product fault in trade, such as gushing bottles, an infection or foreign matter.
• A long power or water outage with beer in the tanks.
• A fire, flood or major equipment failure.
• A licence, excise or legal problem that stops sales.

Write one page per incident. Each page says what to do in the first hour, who does it and who must be told.

Decide who decides

In a crisis the worst outcome is three people giving three different instructions. Name one incident lead for each shift, usually the head brewer or the senior person on site, with a deputy when they are away. That person has authority to stop production, evacuate an area or hold stock without asking permission first.

Name one spokesperson too. Staff should know that questions from customers, trade buyers or the press go to that person. Nobody else posts on social media about the incident. A worried cellar hand writing a reply on Instagram at midnight can turn a small fault into a story.

Know where every batch went

A product crisis is only manageable if you can trace a batch from raw materials to the last outlet that bought it. That means batch codes on every keg, can and bottle, linked in your records to brew dates, malt and hop lots and the yeast generation used.

Test this before you need it. Pick one batch from three months ago and see how long it takes to list every outlet that received it. If the answer is more than a couple of hours, fix the records now. Our guide to writing a beer recall plan walks through the steps of pulling stock back from trade.

Food safety and excise rules on recalls and reporting vary by state and by licence. Your plan should say which authorities you must inform and how, so check the current requirements with your licensing consultant and write them in.

The contact sheet does most of the work

The most used page in any crisis plan is a single sheet of phone numbers, printed and stuck by the brewhouse door as well as saved on phones. It should list:

• The incident lead, deputy and owners.
• The nearest hospital with a casualty department, the fire service and the police.
• Your electricity supplier, a generator hire firm and a refrigeration engineer who will come out at night.
• Your gas supplier, chemical supplier and equipment maintenance contacts.
• Your insurer's claims line, your licensing consultant and your largest trade customers.

Check every number twice a year. A plan with a dead number for the refrigeration engineer fails on the first hot night.

Protect the beer during an outage

Power cuts are the crisis Indian breweries meet most often. Fermenting beer generates heat. A tank of ale fermenting at 19 °C can climb several degrees in a few hours without glycol cooling, which raises the risk of fusel alcohols and other off flavours. Your plan should state which tanks get priority on the generator, in what order and at what point you crash cool or dump a batch.

Packaged beer and kegs in a cold room are less urgent than active fermentations, but not by much. Keep the cold room door shut, note the time the power failed and record the temperature every hour. Yeast slurry stored for repitching should go to the coldest working fridge you have.

Write those thresholds down in advance. Making them up at 2 AM while the glycol chiller is silent rarely ends well. Our guide to a preventive maintenance plan covers keeping the chiller and generator ready.

Test it once a year

A plan that sits in a drawer is not a plan. Once a year, run a tabletop exercise. Sit the team down, describe a scenario such as gushing bottles reported by a bar on a Friday evening. Walk through what each person would do. Time how long the trace takes. Note every gap.

Update the plan the same week. Keep it short enough to read in fifteen minutes, because nobody reads thirty pages in an emergency.

Writing the plan also shows you where the business is fragile, such as one supplier, one person who knows the glycol system or one customer taking half the volume. Fixing those is business management rather than crisis planning. It is worth doing while things are calm.

Your first step

This week, write the contact sheet. One page, every number checked by calling it. Print three copies and put one by the brewhouse door. The rest of the plan is easier once that page exists.

Common questions

What should a brewery crisis plan include?

A page for each likely incident, a named incident lead and spokesperson, a traceability check, a contact sheet and a yearly test. Keep it short enough to read in fifteen minutes.

How often should a brewery test its crisis plan?

At least once a year, with a tabletop exercise that walks the team through a realistic scenario and times the batch trace.

Who should speak to the press in a brewery crisis?

One named spokesperson, usually an owner. Everyone else directs questions to that person and does not post about the incident.