Ever wonder how top breweries consistently produce exceptional beer while maintaining peak efficiency? Join us for an exclusive look at Highland Brewing Company, one of the United States’ most respected craft breweries. Discover the strategies, their people, and tools they use to optimize their operations, from the brewhouse to the packaging line, ensuring quality and maximizing uptime.

In this webinar, you’ll learn:

• How to leverage data and technology to streamline your brewing process and reduce downtime.
• Best practices for preventive maintenance and asset management that keep your equipment running smoothly.
• Strategies for fostering a culture of continuous improvement and operational excellence within your brewery.

Speakers Include:

• Russ Roberton, Director of Operations, Highland Brewing Company
• Benjamin Strall, Production Maintenance Technician, Highland Brewing Company
• Corey Dickens, Principal Solutions Consultant, Brightly, a Siemens Company
• Kate Bernot, Contributing Editor, Brewing Industry Guide and Craft Beer & Brewing

Key Takeaways

• Uncover hidden maintenance gaps because many acquisitions overlook critical maintenance history, equipment compatibility, and vendor relationships, leading to costly surprises post-merger.
• Identify four key blind spots that recognize and address the recurring issues of absent maintenance history, undocumented equipment incompatibilities, invisible vendor relationships, and unstandardized process standards.
• Implement a 90-day integration plan that follows a structured approach for the first three months post-acquisition to build a complete picture, identify and quantify risks, and establish a single source of truth for unified operations.

In Part 1 of this series, we revealed how maintenance blind spots cost one newly consolidated brewery—not from aging equipment or deferred repairs, but from overlooking maintenance (or lack thereof). The uncomfortable truth is that most of it was entirely preventable if the right questions had been asked before the deal closed.

Acquisition due diligence in craft brewing tends to fixate on what’s easy to see, such as brand equity, tap-handle presence, distribution territory, and production capacity.

Meanwhile, maintenance history, equipment compatibility, vendor contracts, and process documentation are treated as “if we get to it” items. By the time operations teams inherit the brewery, the costs are already embedded.

This is the gap that head brewers, directors of brewery operations, and maintenance staff are left to close—usually under pressure and without a roadmap.

The Four Blind Spots That Surface Every Time

Across multisite brewery operations, four due-diligence gaps appear repeatedly. Recognizing them early is the difference between a smooth integration and a costly one.

1. No Maintenance History, No Baseline

When a brewery’s maintenance knowledge lives in one person’s head—or in a handwritten log that hasn’t been touched in months—you have no baseline. You don’t know when critical equipment was last serviced, whether preventive-maintenance schedules were being followed, or who to call for what. Without that foundation, your team is flying blind from Day One.

As we explained in Part 1, for one brewery, a 450-hour preventive-maintenance (PM) task was skipped for one reason: no one knew it existed. Six incidents and $23,000 later, they found the gap.

2. Undocumented Equipment Incompatibilities

Breweries are built incrementally—a fermentor here, a chiller upgrade there, and a secondhand canning line from a brewery that closed two towns over. The result is a patchwork of brands, vintages, and specifications that works fine in isolation—until you’re looking for opportunities to scale and standardize.

Incompatible glycol chiller systems mean you can’t share backup capacity during downtime. Mismatched gasket and seal specifications result in duplicate spare-parts inventory that can’t be consolidated. What should be an hour-long equipment fix can stretch into days of lost production and lost revenue.

3. Invisible Vendor Relationships

Every brewery runs on a web of vendor relationships: glycol service contractors, HVAC providers, CO₂ suppliers, chemical vendors, and equipment service agreements. These relationships are often informal, undocumented, and built on years of handshake deals.

When ownership changes, the agreements don’t automatically transfer. And, when agreements are renegotiated separately at each location, you lose the volume leverage that consolidation was supposed to create.

As we outlined in Part 1, fragmented vendor relationships easily cost one brewery $17,000 annually in lost volume discounts on service contracts alone. Add chemical supply, equipment servicing, and more, and that number climbs fast.

4. Assumed Process Standards

Two breweries can accomplish the same task—such as a clean-in-place (CIP) cycle, a tank inspection, a yeast pitch—in completely different ways. For example, Raleigh might run CIP for 45 minutes at 180°F (82°C) while Chapel Hill runs 90 minutes at 165°F (74°C). Both get the job done, but neither team knows what the other is doing, and nobody has documented which approach is better.

Without a structured standardization process, both methods persist indefinitely. The inefficiencies compound. And in the worst cases, inconsistent CIP procedures don’t just cost money—they create quality headaches.

Your First 90 Days: See Everything, Assume Nothing

Due-diligence gaps don’t close themselves after the deal is signed. The first 90 days post-acquisition are your window to surface what wasn’t visible before closing and begin building toward a unified operation.

Days 1–30: Build a Complete Picture

Walk every inch of the acquired facility with your maintenance lead. Document every major asset: make, model, age, last service date, and known issues. Collect all existing maintenance records—whether digital, paper, or scrawled on a whiteboard. Identify who holds institutional knowledge and capture it before they walk out the door. Catalog spare-parts inventory at both facilities and flag redundancies immediately.

The driving question: What do we actually have, and what do we actually know about it?

Days 31–60: Find the Gaps and Quantify the Risk

Compare PM schedules across both facilities. Identify critical assets with no documented service history. Map process differences—CIP cycles, chemical programs, and inspection intervals. Flag equipment incompatibilities that limit shared capacity options. Then put a number on it. Use the cost framework from Part 1 as your guide. Fragmentation has a price, and quantifying it is what turns a maintenance conversation into a business case.

The driving question: Where are we bleeding money and reliability—and how much is it actually costing us?

Days 61–90: Start Building a Single Source of Truth

Begin centralizing asset documentation in a single shared system accessible to both facilities. Draft a unified PM schedule for critical assets. Start standardizing your most-used spare parts across locations. Initiate vendor consolidation conversations where contract timing allows. Define roles clearly—who owns maintenance decisions at each site, and how do they coordinate?

The driving question: What does “one team, two locations” actually look like in practice?

Bringing It to Life: Lessons from the Brewery

The framework above is only as valuable as the real-world experience behind it. That’s why we’re taking this conversation directly to the people living it.

Join us for an upcoming webinar featuring Highland Brewing Co.’s director of brewery operations and production maintenance team as they share firsthand how Highland has navigated scaling complexity, built operational consistency, and used asset-management tools to scale and sustain success.

This is a maintenance discussion among practitioners, for practitioners. If you’re a head brewer, director of operations, or part of a maintenance team managing multiple facilities, this one is built for you.

Key Takeaways

• As consolidation accelerates, maintenance blind spots are huge hidden costs in newly acquired breweries.
• Multisite breweries that standardize maintenance and operating practices see lower costs, fewer failures, and stronger capacity utilization.
• Asset-management tools are becoming essential for breweries navigating expansion, acquisitions, and multisite complexity.

The craft-beer industry is consolidating at a breakneck pace. The business case is simple: acquire underperforming capacity at favorable prices, leverage shared distribution, consolidate purchasing power, and reduce overhead through operational synergies.

For the second consecutive year, brewery closures (434 in 2025) outpaced openings (268), according to industry data.

At the same time, regional brewers acquired struggling operations. In the first half of 2025, 10 significant acquisitions closed. Brewery collectives such as Oregon Beverage Collective—formed in early 2026 by Crux Fermentation Project, Silver Moon Brewing, Cascade Lakes, GoodLife, and Tumalo Cider—are pooling resources to survive in a market where craft-beer volume declined 5 percent in 2025.

While there is renewed enthusiasm when the deal is done, the honeymoon is short-lived. Within six months, many brewery operators uncover the operational blind spot hidden in their newly acquired business: maintenance.

The True Cost of Operational Inefficiency

Consider a midsize craft brewery that recently acquired its second location. Within six months, the company identified more than $130,000 in annual waste directly attributable to nonstandardized maintenance operations.

This wasn’t a case of deferred maintenance or aging equipment, but simple operational inefficiency caused by running two separate maintenance programs under one corporate umbrella.

Let’s breakdown some examples of how quickly operational costs can compound:

• Duplicate spare-parts inventory: Both breweries stock gaskets, seals, sensors, and valves, but with different brands and specifications. The result is $13,000 in redundant stock that can’t be consolidated because the equipment is all different.
• Fragmented vendor relationships: Service contracts for HVAC, chillers, and equipment maintenance are negotiated separately at each location, eliminating volume-discount leverage. Premium cost: $17,000 annually.
• Chemical-supply inefficiency: Example: Raleigh runs CIP cycles with Chemical A. Chapel Hill uses Chemical B for the same task. Split orders eliminate bulk pricing. Annual waste: $15,000.
• Preventive maintenance failures: Raleigh has a seasoned crew and tracks maintenance tasks, while Chapel Hill had one person, who left during the transition. Result: A skipped 450-hour task results in failure that ends with a batch down the trough. Six incidents in four months: $23,000.
• Lost production capacity: When Raleigh’s chiller fails, they can’t borrow Chapel Hill’s backup because the systems are incompatible. Equipment downtime that should take hours stretches into days. At this point, having one contract with a big company that has a defined SLA would be ideal. Conservative revenue impact: $57,000.
• Technician inefficiency: Maintenance staff waste hours driving between sites with wrong parts, learning different systems, and managing incompatible procedures. Result: $10,000 wasted annually.

This pattern isn’t unique. Industry research on multisite brewery operations identifies “inventory-management nightmares” and “high cost of manual operations” as critical challenges for first-time multisite operators.

The Independent Brewers Alliance notes that purchasing cooperatives exist specifically because fragmented buying power costs independent breweries significant money—the same dynamic that hits multisite operators who fail to standardize.

Why Maintenance Gets Overlooked (and Why That’s Changing)

During acquisitions, due diligence focuses on market-facing elements such as brand strength, distribution relationships, and production capacity. Meanwhile, in-depth maintenance and equipment surveys are an “if we get to it” item.

By the time reactive costs become apparent, they are already embedded in operations. A brewery might notice individual expenses—a higher service contract here or an emergency repair there—without recognizing how incompatible equipment and inconsistent processes compound into higher long-term costs.

When you’re running a single brewery, maintenance is tactical. Equipment knowledge lives in the technical brewer or owner’s head. They know which gasket fits which valve and which vendor to call for glycol service or when the heat exchanger needs attention. Documentation might be sparse, but it works.

Acquire a second facility, and that singular system collapses:

• Raleigh uses Brand X glycol chillers maintained quarterly. Chapel Hill uses Brand Z with no documented schedule.
• Raleigh’s CIP system runs 45 minutes at 180°F (82°C). Chapel Hill runs for 90 minutes at 165°F (74°C) (accomplishing the same task in a different way).

This lack of standardized equipment and streamlined operational practices across both breweries creates cascading inefficiencies. Neglecting routine equipment inspections, inadequate cleaning and sanitization, and the lack of preventive-maintenance strategies rank among the costliest mistakes for breweries.

For multisite brewing operations, these problems multiply when maintenance teams are not working from a single source of truth.

How Asset-Management Tools Help Meet This Moment

In its boom years, roughly 2010 to 2015, the craft-beer market grew 15 to 20 percent annually. But current market conditions show an industry flat or declining as profit margins shrink because of market saturation, rising operational and maintenance costs, and consumer price sensitivity.

Yet brewery mergers and acquisitions continue at pace:

• Tilray Brands became the fourth-largest craft brewer in the United States through aggressive acquisitions.
• Strategic buyers are actively pursuing geographic expansion and portfolio diversification.
• Middle-tier craft breweries are merging to consolidate market positions.

As the market stagnates, breweries that have prioritized proactive maintenance and streamlined operational practices across multiple facilities are outperforming their peers. Those that replace reactive repairs with consistent, planned maintenance and use shared systems to coordinate work across sites see lower maintenance costs, fewer equipment interruptions, and better capacity utilization.

Digital technologies play a crucial role, including computerized maintenance management software (CMMS), brewery-process automation, Internet of Things (IoT) sensor monitoring, overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), and manufacturing execution systems (MES), which help analyze data across sites to prevent analysis paralysis that plagues multisite operations.

For multisite craft breweries, implementing a proactive maintenance system is a strategic advantage. In a market where so many breweries closed in 2025, the difference between being proactive and chaotic may determine who survives consolidation and who gets absorbed.

In Part 2 of this series, we will provide best practices for establishing successful maintenance strategies, including how leading craft breweries are streamlining operational processes and gaining leadership buy-in along the way.

Learn more about how Brightly is helping craft breweries find the right asset-management solutions to support growth, ensure reliability, and simplify multisite operations.