Batch production and inventory for craft beverage makers.
Seasonal recipes, batches that split across kegs and bottles, and glass pricing that moves with the harvest do not fit neatly into a spreadsheet. OakNex scales batches in litres, versions recipes with approvals, and tracks packaging per output SKU.
Common challenges
This year's cider recipe is a copy of last year's spreadsheet with a few cells changed and a new tab name, and it is not always clear which tab is currently in production. A 200 L batch comes off the tank as kegs for the taproom and bottles for the shop, and working out what each format cost means estimating a split after the fact. Glass and fruit pricing shift every season, and the only record of what was paid last time is an old invoice in a folder.
This is common for a small producer running seasonal, small-batch beverages: the product changes every few months while the tools tracking it do not. A spreadsheet holds up until you need to answer what was actually made, and what it cost, for a batch from three months ago.
How OakNex maps to your day
A recipe scales by batch volume in litres, so a 100 L test batch and a 400 L production run pull proportional ingredients from the same recipe. When the season changes and you adjust the blend, editing an approved recipe forks a new draft that goes through approval before it's live — last spring's and this autumn's versions both stay on record, dated and distinct, instead of one recipe quietly overwritten.
Packaging is per output SKU: your keg output and your bottle output on the same recipe each declare their own bottle, cap and label consumption, so a mixed keg-and-bottle run consumes the right materials for each without a manual tally. At completion, the batch's cost splits across whatever mix of formats it actually produced, weighted by the litres each represents, and any leftover liquid gets logged as waste against that batch rather than disappearing into a rounding error.
On the input side, purchasing tracks supplier price tiers and price history for glass, caps, fruit and other ingredients whose pricing moves with volume and season, and raises reorder suggestions before you're short a pallet of bottles mid-run. On the output side, every batch is a traceable lot, so a taproom pour and a shop-shelf bottle from the same run share the same recall trail if you ever need it.
Multi-level recipes carry through too, which matters more than it sounds like it should for a craft producer: a house-made bittering syrup or a fruit purée that goes into three different ciders is itself a recipe, and it explodes correctly into whatever's built on top of it rather than being re-entered as a raw ingredient every time. Selling direct or wholesale runs through the same quote-to-invoice flow, with per-customer pricing for a taproom rate versus a distributor rate, so the discount you agreed with a wholesale account is applied automatically instead of remembered at invoicing time.
Who this isn't for
If you're running a large commercial brewery or cidery with automated canning lines and centralized SCADA reporting, that's not the layer OakNex operates at — it plans and records production and inventory, it doesn't integrate with plant-floor hardware. It fits a producer where a person is still making the blending and packaging calls batch by batch, not a facility running continuous automated lines.
Frequently asked questions
Answers to the questions we hear most often.
Can it handle a batch that ends up split across kegs and bottles?
Yes — a liquid-batch recipe scales in litres, and the work order records the actual output split when you package it, whatever mix of kegs, bottles and cases that turns out to be, with cost allocated across them by the litres each produced and any leftover logged as waste.
We change our recipe every season — does OakNex handle that?
Editing an approved recipe forks a new draft version rather than overwriting it, and that draft goes through approval before it's live. So your spring cider and your autumn cider are two provable, dated versions of the recipe, not the same record quietly edited in place.
Do you handle different packaging per product — kegs vs. bottles vs. cases?
Yes. Each output SKU on a recipe can declare its own packaging — bottle, cap, label, case — so a 20 L keg run and a 330 ml bottle run of the same batch consume the right packaging materials automatically instead of you tracking it by hand.
Can it track supplier pricing for glass and ingredients that changes with volume?
Supplier price tiers let you record volume-break pricing per supplier item, and price history keeps a record of what you actually paid over time — useful when glass and fruit pricing both move seasonally.
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