Brewhouse Efficiency

There are many KPIs at play in a brewery but perhaps the most important is “Brewhouse Efficiency”. This is a measure of how well we are using our raw material (malt) to make fermentable wort.

The main job of the brewer is to take our raw materials – in this case water and malt – and use them to create wort, which is what we call the fermentable sugary liquid which eventually becomes beer.

At Beartown, we buy about 175 tons of malt per year and use this to produce about 1.5 million pints of beer. Due to the costs involved, it’s really important to monitor our performance at extracting the sugar from the malt.

Brewhouse efficiency is expressed as a percentage. This is the percentage of sugar we extract from the malt in our imperfect brewery, as compared to a theoretical maximum achievable in a tightly-controlled laboratory mash. When I started as Head Brewer in April 2023, we were running in the low 80s, which is not where this figure should be.

Through improvements in the brewing process and vitally, by making it a closely-monitored KPI, we were able to increase our BrewHouse Efficiency considerably by the end of 2023.

We continued the improvement throughout 2024 and now we are seeing much more consistent numbers, over 90% almost every week, which is a fantastic result and is where we want this KPI to be.

There are a lot of numbers here so to add some context, the performance increase that the brewing team have worked hard to achieve means we can now make an extra 150,000 pints of beer with the same amount of malt, compared to where we were in early 2023.

In a time when breweries are finding it hard, this piece of work was absolutely vital to do. Many small breweries don’t measure or monitor Brewhouse Efficiency at all but big breweries certainly do, and it’s these habits of bigger breweries that we’re keen to adopt at Beartown, whilst at the same time staying true to our roots and never compromising on quality. The two things are not incompatible at all and I’d argue, are vital for our long-term success.

2025 Brewhouse Efficiency so far