Published: August 29, 2024
Three buddies bonded over beer. Whether it was while drinking or brewing—home brewing at the time, before shifting to a more commercial setting—the trio of Garrett Chambers, Scott Coleman, and Marcus Thomas oozed passion for craft beer.
In early 2017, the triumvirate launched Cushwa Brewing in their hometown.
Things have gone well for the Williamsport, MD-based brewery that prides itself on making exceptional beer and creating a positive impact, all with respect—as its mission statement relays.
“We started very small. We were on a three-and-a-half barrel system to start, and were there for about three and a half years,” says Co-Founder and Production Manager Chambers, who spent time in Vermont at Four Quarters Brewing before founding Cushwa. “And now we’re on a fifteen-barrel system and doing around two thousand barrels a year. We’re not big, but not small, we’re kind of in that mid-small range.”
Thomas has moved on in the intervening years, but Cushwa has continued its growth, expanding to two locations.
“We were all beer nerds before we got this started in our small hometown,” Chambers says. At the time, Williamsport was home to just one brewery. “We wanted to bring newer, trendier beers. The other brewery was brewing very traditional, early 2000s tap list-type things. That’s totally fine, but we wanted [to switch things up to] New England IPAs and bigger stouts.”
As they continued their ascent, reaching as high as 2,400 barrels in one year before settling in closer to their current 2,000 barrels annually, the self-proclaimed spreadsheet nerds Chambers and Co-Founder and Business Development and Sales Manager Coleman needed software to help them keep track of their products and keep operations running smoothly. They eyed well-known brewery management software Ekos but found the platform wasn’t perceptive enough to meet their needs.
When we got hooked up with Ollie, I went into it thinking I’d have to learn a lot, and Ollie did a phenomenal job,
“It wasn’t intuitive at all,” Chambers says. “We paid for Ekos for a year. It was a horrible experience. I didn’t use it for eight months [of that year].”
Needless to say, they moved on from Ekos. Ollie gives Cushwa a fully functioning operation, with features like front-end customer relationship management (CRM), raw material forecasting, cost of goods reporting, and QuickBooks integration—all for one, affordable price.
Cushwa was easily onboarded to Ollie Ops at the start of December last year and added Ollie Order in early February. Chambers says he mans the Ops side of things, with Coleman and General Manager Leo Michanco running the Order aspect of the brewery management software.
“Ekos onboarding set the bar really low,” Chambers said. “When we got hooked up with Ollie, I went into it thinking I’d have to learn a lot, and Ollie did a phenomenal job.”
Chambers adds, “When we started, it was more about Scott wanting Order. I didn’t want Ops because of my experience with Ekos. … I can’t say enough good stuff about the startup phase of this.”
For the Order side, Michanco says the process was very smooth, and each video session was informative.
“They were great at explaining any question that I did have,” Michanco says.
Cushwa eased into the functionality of Ollie at first, focusing on inventory, recipe formulation, and packaging. Chambers says he held off to fully understand it and is now sharing Ollie’s uses with the other brewers on staff.
“We plan to take advantage of data processing things that we hadn’t gone through before,” Chambers says. “[And] we’re transitioning now and going to use QuickBooks Online.”
Even though Cushwa hasn’t utilized all Ollie has to offer, the brewery has immediately seen the dividends.
(Above photography courtesy of Cushwa Brewing)
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Ollie Saves Cushwa Brewing Several Hours A Week
Photography courtesy of Cushwa Brewing
Whether on the production side or the sales side, Chambers and Michanco say that since the brewery started using Ollie to accomplish daily tasks, the intuitive brewery management platform has made a world of difference in their workload.
“It’s made invoicing a quicker process,” Michanco says. “Before, I was using a spreadsheet and a fairly manual invoice sheet.”
Michanco adds, “Also, it’s put all of our other information into one collected area, so it’s easier to look up SKU price and other random info.”
Chambers says he can’t remember the amount of time it took to get similar tasks done with Ekos but knows with Ollie, it’s less.
“With Ekos, the best way to describe it is that it created more work because you had to input so many things,” Chambers says. “And it was specific about the path you had to take from start brewing to finish and package.”
Ollie saves me a couple hours a week,
Chambers shares anecdotally how, with Ekos, if you didn’t have an ingredient in inventory, you couldn’t start brewing the batch.
“I know we have it on-site, but it wasn’t received in the system,” Chambers recalls. “And I need to start [this brew] now.”
Ollie circumvents that issue.
“You can roll through a brew without having to worry about certain things,” Chambers says. “You can almost do a lot of things through the production process in Ollie and then go back and assign lot codes.”
He adds, “Sometimes I’ll add yeast a week later. … I can proceed without the workload piling up. And if something is done incorrectly, it’s easy to backtrack and fix it. Ekos didn’t allow it.”
All the flexibility has led to Cushwa saving time.
“Ollie saves me a couple hours a week,” Chambers states. “I can generate what I need faster and order through Ollie so I don’t have to go to multiple sites.”
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Cushwa Raves About Ollie’s Ease of Use, Functionality
Photography courtesy of Cushwa Brewing
Chambers says he loves spreadsheets. So does Coleman. And that worked really well for a time.
“But it wasn’t all-encompassing; the info wasn’t all in one place, and it’s hard to get all the reporting,” Chambers says. “The distribution side has grown. When it was sold in-house, it was easier to follow the trail. Now, it’s not quite as easy. Ollie Order makes their lives a lot easier.”
On the Ops side, Chambers says that monitoring inventory is easier than ever.
“We have a warehouse guy who can check [inventory], click received, and it adds it to the database,” he says. “Before, he’d have to manually add that. And for me, starting brews, dry hopping, and everything [else], Ollie takes it out of our inventory. It’s helped me a lot.”
Photography courtesy of Cushwa Brewing
And the subsequent tracking and analysis of the cost of goods makes life easier as well.
“Before, if I changed a recipe, I’d have to change the spreadsheet and update the pricing,” Chambers says. “Now, if I change, it’s just about removing one and adding another and it recalculates automatically.”
Chambers adds that it’s neat to see how the costs of their five core beers stack up from batch to batch.
“It’s nice to see how they compare cost-wise, how they sell, and how much we spend,” he says. “It’s a no-brainer of how to handle that situation.”
Chambers says that Ollie has a ton of flexibility, saves time, and condenses what they need to do by putting everything in one spot.
“It’s very user-friendly,” he says.
Michanco sees the same versatility with Ollie Order.
“All of the sales data just being readily available and shown on the main page without having to dig around a bunch is super helpful,” Michanco says. “It’s very easy to use.”
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About The Author
Giovanni Albanese
Giovanni is a content writer for Next Glass, contributing to the Ollie blog. He is a writer by day and a brewer/business owner by night, owning and operating Settle Down Brewery & Taproom in Gilroy, California.
Giovanni is passionate about a number of things, including history, documentaries and sports, but none more than reporting/writing and brewing beer. After receiving a radio broadcasting degree then a journalism degree from Salem State College in his home state of Massachusetts, he relocated to California in 2008.
Then, his writing career kicked off – covering sports, business, politics and more along the way – while concurrently dabbling in home brewing. The home brewing turned pro in 2021 when he launched SDB Brewing Company. Settle Down Beer officially opened in February.
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