Invest in Your Employees, Start with Crafting Brewery Culture

Brewery and taproom operations are defined by their most valuable assets: their employees. The importance of recruiting, developing, and supporting staff members cannot be overstated—how you support and empower your employees makes a significant difference in the long-term success of the company. Build a culture, inspire teams, plan a successful future.

Required reading for breweries of all sizes, with or without a dedicated human resources department, Crafting Brewery Culture is an invaluable road map for building a culture-based mindset throughout leadership and management that focuses on people as partners and employing them properly as part of resourcing the brewery.

“Every process or procedure has a human component.”

Despite all the attention understandably paid to physical equipment, employees are the most valuable assets in a brewery.

At its core, a brewery is a collection of interlocking priorities and teams, where no task exists in a vacuum. Just like ripples in a pond that extend far beyond the stone’s point of entry, events in the brewery can have consequences that reverberate throughout the organization. Those ripples manifest in everything affected by an action. Improperly sanitized equipment can compromise not only the beer it touches, but also lead to cross-contamination throughout the facility. Seamer issues on a canning line have an obvious direct effect on beer quality but also create additional labor and material costs, potentially even extending to distributor supply disruptions and loss of consumer confidence. While physical equipment is involved in these events, people remain at the core. Every process or procedure has a human component, either during the performance of the task or while reacting to the results. The tasks that operators accomplish, the systems they inhabit, and the decisions they make are essential to the successful long-term performance of a brewery.

Build Your Culture

Crafting Brewery Culture: A Human Resources Guide for Small Breweries lays out how to build a culture-based mindset throughout leadership and management focused on people as partners and employing them properly as part of resourcing the brewery. The key to building this mindset is creating an organized approach to the process of developing, managing, and maintaining the components that comprise an effective workplace culture. There is a significant body of literature on the topic of organizational culture, but this text endeavors to place lessons from that catalog into the context of a working brewery.

The first several chapters will describe how to assemble the building blocks of a resilient culture. Hiring, training, developing, and assessing employees are all examples of investments in the people who make up the core of a brewery. These topics stack onto each other and form the foundation for everything we do, from safety and quality to delivering exceptional customer service.

In the second section, the book aims to define the criteria needed to bring a culture to life and sustain it. Hiring and training are, at their core, policies. Without deliberate effort, policies become dusty three-ring binders on a shelf. Even programs that are actively in place may settle into a pattern of checking boxes and not keep up with the current needs of the brewery. Policies that were perfectly suited to the way the brewery was five years ago can provide a false sense of security about what is happening right now, much less help prepare for the future. Successful cultures are an iterative pattern, always seeking to adapt to changing environments.

Finally, the book’s appendices offer working templates for everything from interviews to training plans, performance assessments, and goal-setting.

From April 11 to 18, 2023, enjoy free standard shipping from Brewers Publications with the purchase of Crafting Brewery Culture. Additional discounts apply for Brewers Association and American Homebrewers Association members.

Craft Brewers Conference® & BrewExpo America® attendees are invited to attend author Gary Nicholas’ seminar on May 8, “The Roads Beyond Nashville: Establishing Professional Development within Your Brewery’s Culture,” and his book signings on May 8 and 9.