Craft Brewers

Craft Beer Courses

Craft Brewer Trainings and Resources

After this upcoming spring season, the training opportunities below will no longer be available. If you were planning on completing a training, make sure to register now.

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Program Snapshot

Next Start Date

Self-paced

Cost

Free (Maximizing Tap Room Revenue & Managing Your Brewery Finances) | $499 (Beer Wholesaler Financial Training)

Learning Format

Online

Online Learning Type

Asynchronous

Duration

4 wks (Maximizing Tap Room Revenue & Managing Your Brewery Finances) | 5 wks (Beer Wholesaler Financial Training)

Time Commitment

10 hrs/wk (Maximizing Tap Room Revenue & Managing Your Brewery Finances) | 8 hr/wk (Beer Wholesaler Financial Training)

Overview

Whether you need a crash course in finance or are looking for strategies to optimize your taproom sales, we’ve got the courses you need to take your beer business to the next level. Learn from industry experts who share your passion for creating customer affinity through hands-down excellence in craft brewing. Courses are designed for aspiring and established craft beer professionals alike.

Learn 100% online and at your own pace — and check back often for new courses.

Curriculum

Overview  

Taprooms are having a heyday — and have become a highly profitable business for many breweries. Learn how you can turn your taproom into an opportunity to maximize revenue and build engaging connections with your customers.

In this course you will learn strategies and tactics to increase brewery taproom sales and profitability. By creating financial scorecards, you will be able to utilize key taproom metrics to benchmark and improve financial performance. You will learn how to create a chart of accounts to further measure and improve your bottom line and how to utilize templates to help you project your taproom sales, margins, and operating costs.

The course also covers how to analyze point of sale (POS) options for taprooms and how to increase brand awareness and customer traffic using e-commerce, email, and social media.

Whether you are planning to open a new taproom or optimize a current venture, this course provides essential strategies to achieving financial success.

Curriculum  

After this free four-module online training, you’ll be able to:

  • Implement specific strategies and tactics to grow taproom revenue
  • Utilize a sales growth model to measure and improve customer foot traffic and average spend per taproom guest
  • Create financial scorecards to measure results and benchmark against key metrics
  • Build a taproom financial chart of accounts, summary income statements, and balance sheets
  • Utilize templates to project taproom sales, margins, and operating costs
  • Analyze POS options and understand the key features of different systems
  • Implement e-commerce, email, and social media tactics to increase your brand awareness and drive customer traffic to your taproom

Instructors

Instructor Kary Shumway Explains Maximizing Taproom Revenue Course

“Financial literacy is the name of the game. It’s the ability to read and understand the numbers of your brewery taproom business and most folks don’t…And it’s not their fault. Accounting can be complicated and you have to set it up right and you have to have good systems and processes in place.”

Kara Shumway, Business of Craft Beer Instructor

Overview  

Before you dive into cost of goods sold (COGS), cost accounting or margins, you need to know how to get good data—to know you can trust the numbers coming out of your accounting system.

You will start by exploring a few key accounting concepts and identifying administrative resources to help you “be everything to everybody.” Then you will create your accounting structure by determining the businesses within your brewery and how best to track them in the system. A chart of accounts (COA) can give you a lot of information, and you will create a customized COA that will enable you to easily see your brewery’s gross margin.

Next, you will identify effective “period close” or discrete spans of time, and establish a financial statement review. You will learn how to reconcile bank statements and create journal entries for accruals and prepays. Finally, you will explore how a budget becomes a forecast and how to use a 360 degree forecast to understand each component of your brewery.

Once all of these steps are in place, you will be able to generate accurate, actionable data that will drive brewery decisions. You will also be able to translate that data into an understandable format for management and other key stakeholders.

Curriculum  

By the end of the course, participants will be able to:

  • Identify administrative resources
  • Describe key administrative concepts (taxation, insurance, HR, accounting, sales tax, excise tax, etc.)
  • Determine the businesses within your brewery and how best to track them in an accounting system
  • Create a customized chart of accounts (COA)
  • Reconcile bank statements and create journal entries for accruals and prepays
  • Complete a financial statement review of your books
  • Articulate how a budget becomes a forecast
  • Describe levels of forecasting and types of forecasts, and how all forecasts work together
  • Conduct a 360 view forecast to understand each component of the brewery
  • Generate accurate financial data to inform brewery decisions, and translate the data for key stakeholders

Instructors

Overview  

Take advantage of this valuable opportunity to learn finance fundamentals for sales managers, general managers, and brewery staff from a beer industry veteran.

With over 20 years of experience in the beer business as a CPA and CFO, instructor Kary Shumway combines the most up-to-date industry strategies with the fundamentals of finance.  In this course, Kary unpacks commonly missed opportunities to improve sales, margins, and profitability in the wholesale world and shares real-world examples that can be applied immediately to your business.

The Beer Wholesaler Financial Training Program is for owners, managers and staff who need practical financial training to improve cash flow and profitability.

Curriculum  

The Course includes 40+ lessons delivered across 5 modules, with a total of 8 hours of instruction, 5 graded quizzes and a final exam.

After this online course, you’ll understand:

  • Gross profit and how to improve it
  • Inventory and SKU management best practices
  • How to build a sales forecast to drive revenue

You’ll receive templates and step-by-step instructions to support your implementation of the practices that Kary covers.

Complete the training at your own pace, on your time. No prior financial expertise is needed.

Instructors