Brewery Budget Season and Planning for the New Year

It’s November, Quarter 3 is in the books, and Quarter 4’s holiday surge is on the way, which  can be a great spike in revenue to end the year. But as a Brewery Owner, you know the January/February slump is on the horizon and can erase those gains without a plan. Don’t start 2026 behind, or worse, with no plan at all.

Proactive budgeting gives you a roadmap, cash flow visibility, and ultimately peace of mind to enter the New Year with a plan and goals for your business. Your plans will evolve, but starting to think ahead beats risking reactive damage to your business.

Here is the Plato Beverage Consulting guide to put together your Brewery Budget for 2026:

1.      Gather, Compile, and Review your Business Sales and Operations Data from 2025

Collect and organize past financial and operational data to establish baselines for forecasting. This includes Financial Statements, Sales Reports (review in-house sales and Distribution sales separately), Production reports, and Inventory reports.

It helps to take each report individually whether you are using an ERP system or a more manual tracking method, input your data into excel or other software to visualize, establish trends, highlight concerns, and make decisions of what to pull back on or double down on for the upcoming year.

This ensures your 2026 projections are grounded in reality vs just throwing hopeful numbers up as projections with no basis. This is also a good time to review all of your most up to date product costing sheets, recent COGS pricing, margin health, and see where things are trending to update pricing strategy and rollout plans for the new year.

2.      Forecast Sales Volume and Revenue Based on Internal Data and Growth Plans

Once you have gathered and processed all your relevant data points, it is time to project those out into the new year. It is important to take note of recent internal trends, external trends, seasonality variance, as well as your plans to grow your business. Projecting 2026 sales based on your business/traffic growth trends, local market factors, and pricing adjustments. This sets the top-line foundation for the entire budget and will be used to back into the remaining production needs and other expenses.

If you are projecting growth, be sure you can point to a realistic reason and where that growth is coming from (e.g. you are adding a sales representative and expect him/her to open a new territory with xx accounts by month 6, you have more in house scheduled events planned for 2026, etc.). It should be noted that just adding additional tanks/capacity or even additional seating is NOT a factor in projecting growth.

3.      Build a Production Plan Based on Sales and Revenue Forecasts

At this point, you have reviewed your historical data and put together a sales forecast for 2026. The heavy lifting is essentially done. Now you just need to put a production schedule to that forecast!

Make sure this production schedule is based on the distribution of products and styles from last years sales reports. Update all of your recipes and costing sheets with the latest ingredient and shipping costs and projections for price increases. This is also a good opportunity to be honest with yourself about cutting out any underperforming/slow moving products in your lineup. As a general rule, any beer or product that accounts for less than 5% of total category revenue for 2-3 months in a row should be on the chopping block.

3a. Build a COGS Budget Based on your Production Plan

Once your production plan is completed, put some costs to each batch you plan to brew and outline an ordering schedule. This will help forecast and plan major order needs and cash flow for high priority ingredients, yeasts, and other consumables for your brewery operations.

It is worth noting, the tasting room and kitchen Managers should be performing this exact same review, forecast, and budget plan for their respective departments! We are just focusing on the brewery side of things for this article.

4.      Develop Labor and Operating Expense Budget Based on your Forecasts and Production Plans

Now that you have your Forecast and Production Plan all costed out on the ingredient side, the final part of the process will be ensuring you plan all of your labor schedule needs to execute the plan! Be sure to take into account potential hiring and even seasonal downsizing if applicable. You can determine your labor utilization and efficiency while you review and plan your labor for next year as well as ensure your labor costs stay on target to maintain healthy margins.

Bonus: Think ahead and determine any major Capital Expenditures if Planning for High Growth: Things like tank purchases, centrifuge, filter, canning line, delivery van, or other large equipment purchases. Even if you aren’t sure you need it yet, it is good to have a list of what those next large purchases will be as well as what sales volume or production milestone will trigger its need!

5.      Finalize P&L, Base Case, Best/Worst Case Scenarios, Review

Compile everything into a master budget, test sensitivities, and get buy-in from your managers and team. This locks in the plan for execution. This is key to flag any highly sensitive items or areas of the budget to keep a close eye on – e.g. COGS pricing and margin health, utility expense increases, seasonal traffic increases or decreases and associated labor adjustments.

6.      Communicate with Team, Implement, and Stick to your Plan for 2026!

Load the budget into systems, meet with all managers and your team to communicate pertinent info and business goals, and set up tracking to stay on course throughout the year. This budget should be reviewed on a monthly, quarterly, and annual basis at the very minimum. Most breweries are reviewing their sales reports and production reports/cost on a weekly basis to ensure they are on top of any major changes in trends or unexpected pricing/traffic changes.

Building your 2026 brewery budget now is crucial. Starting with solid 2025 sales and ops data, realistic sales forecasts, an accurately costed production plan, and labor/expense alignment delivers locked-in ingredient pricing, smoother cash flow through the Q1 dip, and a unified team both aware of and ready to hit business growth targets. Skip the scramble and delayed planning and start the New Year with clarity and control. If you’d like a second set of eyes on your numbers or help turning your data into a bulletproof plan, reach out to us at Plato Beverage Consulting.