The weekend that takes three months
Your beer festival is the biggest weekend of the year. It starts in spring with emails to breweries, a spreadsheet of beers and a scrawled plan for where the extra stillage goes. By summer the spreadsheet has several versions. Some breweries have confirmed, some have not. The beer list for the programme has to go to the printer and is out of date the moment it is printed.
On the weekend, volunteers staff the bar, customers buy tokens, and by Saturday evening half the list is gone but nobody knows which half. People queue for a beer that finished an hour ago. On Monday, you have leftover casks, a tin of tokens, a box of glasses and no idea what sold best.
Why festivals get chaotic
A festival is a small project with a lot of moving parts: dozens of breweries, each with its own confirmation, delivery arrangement and invoice; stillage and cooling; programmes; tokens or glass deposits; volunteer rotas; sale-or-return terms on some casks. It happens once a year, so nobody builds a proper system, and each year starts from last year's spreadsheet.
On the day, the information that matters most is what is ready, what is pouring and what has run out, and that lives with whoever is in the cellar or behind the festival bar.
What festival chaos costs
| Problem | Effect |
|---|---|
| Unconfirmed orders | Gaps on the stillage or surprise deliveries |
| Printed list out of date | Disappointed customers asking for beers that never came |
| No live beer board | Queues for beers that have run out |
| Token sales untracked | Cash and token counts that never agree |
| No record of what sold | Next year's order made from memory |
A festival is also your pub's reputation on show. Customers remember whether the beer they came for was there and whether the bar ran smoothly.
The money side is easy to lose track of. Casks bought outright, casks on sale or return, token income, glass deposits and volunteer expenses all need settling afterwards, and doing that from a tin and a pile of delivery notes on the Monday after is when mistakes happen.
One festival plan from spring to Monday
- Each beer is added with its brewery, style, strength, cask size, cost, delivery date and whether it is sale or return. Brewery confirmations and deliveries are ticked off as they happen.
- A stillage plan shows where each cask sits and when it should be ready, using your own settling times.
- The beer list for the programme and website is produced from the plan, and reprinted easily if something changes.
- During the festival, cask status is updated from a phone in the cellar, and a live what's-pouring board shows on a screen, the website and a QR code on the tables.
- Token or card sales are recorded at the token desk, and volunteer shifts are planned in the same place.
- After the festival, the tool shows what sold, how fast and what is left, which casks are to be returned, and the figures for next year.
Your festival's licensing and any other permissions are for you and your adviser. We build the planning and tracking side.
Festival weekend with a plan
By July, every brewery has confirmed and delivery days are set. The programme goes to print from the plan. On Saturday, the cellar marks casks as they finish, and the board on the website and the screen by the bar changes. Customers see what is still on. On Monday you can see which beers sold out first and which sat until the end.
- Every cask tracked from order to empty
- A beer list and programme that stay current
- A live board of what is pouring
- Figures to plan next year's festival
Is your festival planned like this?
- Festival planning lives in several versions of a spreadsheet.
- Beers on the printed list did not arrive.
- Customers queue for beers that have run out.
- Token money and token counts never quite agree.
- You do not know which beers sold best last year.