NetSuite for Breweries With Beer30 (How a Brewery ERP Splits the Work)

Craft brewing is in a correction. The Brewers Association counted 9,578 operating craft breweries at the end of 2025, with 481 closings against 300 openings, the second year running that closings outpaced openings. When volume is flat or falling, margin matters more, and in a brewery margin comes down to cost per barrel, beer loss and how hard the tanks work.

We recently ran a webinar with Beer30 by The 5th Ingredient, the brewery production software, showing NetSuite keeping the books while Beer30 runs the brewhouse. The clips below come from that session.

Signs you've outgrown QuickBooks and spreadsheets

The breaking point usually shows up in sales before it shows up in accounting. When inventory lives in a spreadsheet and orders live somewhere else, sales commits beer that hasn't been packaged yet and keeps selling a brand after the last keg went out.

If several of these describe your month, the spreadsheets are costing more than they save. Our guide to the signs you've outgrown QuickBooks covers the same question for food and beverage companies generally.

Why NetSuite doesn't run the brewhouse on its own

NetSuite handles recipes better than most breweries expect. It supports routing steps, multi-level bills of materials, subassemblies, phantom assemblies and several active BOM revisions at once. If you sell a canned cocktail made by a co-packer, standard NetSuite for manufacturing covers most of the job.

Brewing breaks the model on the floor. An ale sits in a fermenter for about three weeks and a lager closer to two months. Someone takes a reading every day, and the readings drive the work: some cellar tasks trigger at a target gravity rather than on a set day, and the beer moves to the brite tank only when it's ready. Mid-batch, the brewer may split a batch across two tanks, dilute it or blend it with another. A general ERP models a work order with inputs and outputs. It has no field for a gravity reading that tells the cellar crew what to do tomorrow.

Beer30 is built around that day. Recipes carry gravity- and day-based cellar tasks that land on each brewer's dashboard every morning. The tank farm shows QC holds at a glance, quality checkpoints and sensory data sit with the batch, and yeast harvests and batch genealogy are tracked alongside. Beer30 includes unlimited users and runs in a browser on a tablet, so the cellar crew and packaging techs don't each need a NetSuite license.

Who owns what between Beer30 and NetSuite

NetSuite runs finance, purchasing, inventory valuation, sales orders and the general ledger. Beer30 runs production: recipes, tanks, fermentation, quality and the brewing schedule. The two sync both ways. The 5th Ingredient launched the integration on May 5, 2026, with Kona Brewing Hawaii as the first brewery on it.

Mapping production records to your items, locations and chart of accounts is part of setting up any NetSuite integration, and it's work we do as part of our NetSuite integration services.

No integration fixes data entry. If the cellar skips logging a hop addition, both systems carry the wrong inventory and the variance surfaces at month-end. Beer30 flags a skipped ingredient before a brew step closes, which catches the most common miss.

One batch, end to end

Take batch 11 of a brown sugar ale.

1. Malt and hops are bought on a NetSuite purchase order and received against lot numbers. The lots and their cost flow into Beer30.
2. On brew day, Beer30 pulls live inventory from NetSuite at mash-in, and the brewer picks the actual lots going into the mash. Skip an ingredient and Beer30 flags it before the step closes.
3. As the batch moves through brew, ferment, filter and brite tank to packaging, Beer30 posts the matching assembly builds and work orders to NetSuite step by step.
4. While it ferments, the beer is work in process. The WIP report, synced between the two systems, shows barrels in tank and their dollar value at month-end.
5. Once it's packaged, the beer lands in Beer30's distribution hub. Sales orders entered in NetSuite flow in, and the hub shows which batch codes are on hand, down to which kegs came from which batch.
6. Batch history then shows knockout volume, yields, raw material and packaging cost and cost per barrel, and the same COGS detail is in NetSuite.

The Same Records Answer a Recall

Say an account reports an off-flavor in a keg from batch 11. Going back, Beer30's batch genealogy shows the tanks, yeast generation and ingredient lots behind it, and those lots trace to NetSuite receipts and vendors. Going forward, the batch codes in the distribution hub and the sales orders behind them show where the rest of the batch went. Lot traceability, along with batch and outsourced manufacturing, is one of the areas we've worked hardest on for food and beverage clients, and our Lot Expiration Required add-on makes an expiration date mandatory on every lot received against a purchase order.

TTB and excise basics

Brewers file the Brewer's Report of Operations on TTB Form 5130.9 each month. If you owed no more than $50,000 in beer excise tax last year and expect the same this year, you can file quarterly instead, on Form 5130.9 or 5130.26 (27 CFR 25.297). The quarterly report is due by the 15th of the month after the quarter ends (TTB filing due dates).

The excise return, Form 5000.24, runs on its own schedule: annual if your beer tax is $1,000 or less, quarterly up to $50,000, semimonthly above that. You file it even for a period with no removals (27 CFR 25.164). Under the Craft Beverage Modernization Act, a domestic brewer making 2 million barrels a year or less pays $3.50 a barrel on the first 60,000 barrels and $16 on the rest, against a general rate of $18 (TTB tax rates).

Beer30 lists compliance and reporting among what it handles on the production side. State container taxes are a separate layer: we built a NetSuite process that adds California CRV and other state container fees to sales automatically, so they land on the invoice instead of in a surprise bill. There's more on that in our overview of NetSuite for food and beverage.

For distillers

Distilling is a tighter market than brewing. The American Craft Spirits Association counted 2,131 active US craft distillers in August 2026, down 6.6% in a year.

Compliance is heavier, too. Distilled spirits plants file four monthly operations reports, on Forms 5110.40, 5110.11, 5110.28 and 5110.43 (27 CFR 19.632). The excise return can move to annual or quarterly filing at the same $1,000 and $50,000 thresholds as beer (27 CFR 19.235). CBMA rates are $2.70 per proof gallon on the first 100,000, $13.34 from there up to 22,230,000, and $13.50 general.

Beer30 tracks heads, tails, still and column-still data and barrel aging with cost per cask, and the company says about 12% of the liquid running through it isn't beer. The harder NetSuite question for a distillery is costing: a barrel can sit in work in process for years, so how you carry and revalue its cost matters far more than for a three-week ale.

Do you need NetSuite, or is brewery software enough?

Volume is a rough guide. Spreadsheets tend to hold up below 300 to 1,000 barrels a year, brewery software earns its place somewhere around 800 to 1,500, and the ERP conversation usually starts between 3,000 and 10,000. Structure decides it more than barrels do: how many entities and sites you run, how you distribute, and who reads your financials.

Brewery Software on Its Own

A single-entity taproom brewery where the owner keeps the books can run on brewery software alone, and doesn't need an ERP built for a Sierra Nevada. The 5th Ingredient sells Beer30 Lite from $30 a month for that size of operation.

Brewery Software Plus QuickBooks

Most craft breweries run this way. Beer30 already syncs with QuickBooks Online, from AP and AR up to the full general ledger. Kona Brewing Hawaii had used Beer30 for more than four years when it told The 5th Ingredient it had outgrown QuickBooks Online and needed a more robust financial system.

Brewery Software Plus NetSuite

NetSuite pays off when the complexity, not the company size, has outrun basic accounting: more than one entity or site, self-distribution with inventory in several locations, owners or lenders who expect monthly financials, or a finance team that spends the month reconciling. Multi-subsidiary consolidation and drill-down from a report line to the transaction behind it are what you're paying for.

Beer30's published pricing starts at $118 a month and scales with production volume. The connector fee isn't published and NetSuite licensing is quoted, which is where a NetSuite implementation partner earns its keep. Timing matters, too: BERO, a fast-growing beverage brand, started on NetSuite from day one rather than migrating mid-growth.

What About Crafted ERP?

Search "brewery ERP" and Crafted ERP shows up next to Beer30. Crafted is built in NetSuite, so production and finance share one system and one vendor. The Beer30 route keeps production in an app built for brewers, with unlimited users, and syncs it to NetSuite as the ledger, which means two systems and an integration to maintain. The deciding questions are who uses the system every day, what NetSuite seats for the floor would cost, and whether your brewers will keep the data current. When we checked in October 2026, Ekos didn't list a NetSuite integration.

What the switch can be worth

Beer30 points to Pelican Brewing, which moved its production from OrchestratedBEER to Beer30. Beer30's case study puts the result at "over $550,000 a year," from lower cost of goods, faster tank turns and added production.