The craft beverage industry is changing fast, and the breweries that thrive will be the ones that put the right technology to work. In this webinar, we'll explore the trends reshaping how breweries operate, from ERPs and emerging MCP integrations to smart payment and finance solutions that tighten cash flow. We'll also look at how digitizing your local supplier and distribution relationships can save time, reduce friction, and set your brewery up for whatever comes next.

Speakers Include:

• Dustin Jeffers: Vice President, Producer Product | Next Glass

• Chris Farmand: Founder, CEO | Small Batch Standard

• Ryan Dick: Managing Partner - Experience, Events & Ecommerce | Everywhere Beer Co.

• John M. Verive, Contributing Writer, Craft Beer & Brewing

In Part I of our series about the top tech trends shaping the beverage industry in 2027, we explored how the market landscape has evolved—and how breweries can use connected technology to adapt. From ERP systems and real-time analytics to AI-powered decision-making, the common thread is clear: the breweries that thrive won’t just brew great beer; they’ll build smarter, more efficient businesses.

But today, success means thinking beyond beer alone.

“You have to be more than a beer company,” says Next Glass VP of brewery, product & experience, Dustin Jeffers. “It helps to diversify.”

Today, building a smarter brewery means building a smarter beverage company. For many producers, that means expanding into cider, spirits, wine, coffee, nonalcoholic beverages, THC drinks, or contract manufacturing.

“You need to make sure that the people who come in [to your taproom] are going to stay longer because the whole group wants to be there,” says Jeffers. “And a larger chunk of people can all find something to enjoy at your location.”

The same philosophy applies behind the scenes. As beverage businesses grow more diverse, the technology supporting them must become more connected—streamlining payments, simplifying wholesale ordering, and making it easier to collaborate with the customers and partners who help drive growth.

Here are three more tech trends shaping the future of beverage businesses in 2027.

Trend #4: The Future of Beverage Payments: Less Manual Work, More Margin

Most breweries spend a lot of time optimizing production. Far fewer spend the same amount of time optimizing how they get paid. Yet for many beverage producers, the biggest operational bottleneck isn’t brewing, packaging, or distribution—it’s the order-to-cash process.

Traditionally, this process requires too many steps: sales teams create orders, accounting teams generate invoices, customers navigate separate payment portals, and finance teams spend hours reconciling transactions. Each handoff creates more opportunities for delays, errors, and unnecessary administrative work.

As beverage businesses look to operate more leanly in 2027, embedded payments are becoming the next evolution in brewery operations. Instead of treating payments as a separate process, solutions such as PaySmart, which launched this past March, bring orders, invoicing, payments, and reconciliation together into a single operational workflow in either Ekos or Ollie. Breweries, wineries, cideries, distilleries, and beverage producers can move from order creation to invoice settlement without switching among disconnected systems or relying on manual exports.

The impact goes beyond convenience. Without ever leaving Ekos, PaySmart facilitates EFT payments, improving cash flow and predictability, reducing reconciliation work, and giving finance teams greater visibility into outstanding invoices. Buyers benefit too because they can securely enter bank details once, manage invoices in a single portal, and avoid check stock, mail delays, and late payment fees.

For Trace Smith, CEO of Next Glass, the goal wasn’t simply to launch another payment processor—it was to eliminate one of the industry’s most persistent operational headaches.

“We built PaySmart to address the feedback of our nearly 2,000 producer customers who have consistently asked us for a lower-cost payment solution that is fully embedded in their business management system of choice, Ekos or Ollie,” says Smith. “For too long, our customers have suffered from overpriced payments and clunky, off-platform point-payment solutions requiring manual exports of data from Ekos and Ollie. We are thrilled to deliver this fully embedded, cost-effective option that saves our customers time and money relative to existing alternatives.”

In 2027, depending on what state you’re in, PaySmart will also introduce credit-card payments, “allowing you not to have to use Fintech or QuickBooks payment links and just do everything inside your ERP,” says Jeffers, who adds that the industry in general is trending toward all-electronic payment processing.

That focus on integration matters because payments don’t happen in isolation. They’re connected to sales, inventory, accounting, and customer relationships. The more those systems communicate automatically, the less time teams spend chasing paperwork and reconciling transactions.

The financial impact adds up quickly. Even a producer processing just 50 invoices each month can save up to $495 annually while eliminating hours of manual payment administration. For larger producers processing hundreds of invoices, the operational savings—and the faster cash flow—can be even more significant.

The breweries gaining an edge in 2027 won’t just brew more efficiently. They’ll get paid more efficiently, too.

Trend #5: Retailer Ordering Should Be as Easy as Buying a Six-Pack

Consumers have come to expect effortless buying experiences. Need groceries? Open an app. Need dinner delivered? Tap a few times. Need craft beer? In many markets, it takes just a couple of clicks.

For years, beverage sales have depended on a familiar routine: a sales rep checks in with an account, a buyer places an order by phone or email, someone manually enters the order into a system, and the finance team follows up with invoices and payments. So, while the rest of the consumer world can access their daily goods quickly, why should wholesale ordering still rely on phone calls, emails, spreadsheets, and manual data entry?

As breweries grow, those manual touchpoints become one of the biggest hidden drains on productivity, as sales teams spend more time chasing orders than building relationships and retailers have to wait until business hours to place an order. The next evolution of beverage sales isn’t about replacing sales reps, but about giving retailers the freedom to order whenever—and however—they want.

“We’re building a tool that makes sales reps more efficient,” explains Jeffers. “You can stay top of mind with customers even when you’re not actually there.”

Digital ordering platforms such as OrderHub let bars, restaurants, and retailers connect freely with self-distributing craft-beverage producers through one shared, centralized ordering experience. Buyers can browse available inventory and place orders on their own schedule, while producers eliminate repetitive administrative work behind the scenes.

“And now your sales team can make their visits to accounts less about order taking,” says Jeffers, “and more about upselling and relationship building.”

That’s the real opportunity with digital ordering—removing friction from the sales process for both producers and retailers. As breweries continue to look for ways to grow without adding headcount or unnecessary administrative work, self-service ordering will become less a convenience and more a competitive advantage.

Next year, it’s pretty simple: simplify the ordering experience and sell more beverages.

Trend #6: Copacking without the Chaos

For many breweries, growth no longer comes solely from selling more of their own beer. Increasingly, it comes from making beverages for someone else.

Copacking has become one of the fastest-growing revenue opportunities for breweries, cideries, and beverage producers looking to maximize tank space and diversify their business. But with every additional customer comes another layer of operational complexity—from managing dedicated inventory and production schedules to tracking raw materials and keeping brand partners informed.

What works for one brewery quickly becomes much harder when you’re manufacturing products for five, 10, or 20 different customers. That’s why the next generation of brewery software helps producers manage their own operations while simultaneously collaborating directly with the brands they produce for.

With Ekos’s enhanced copacking capabilities, contract brewing partners can securely access the information that’s most important to them, including available raw materials, inventory levels, and production progress, without relying on constant emails or status updates.

“We make it really easy to see how much of those ingredients they have in stock, what’s been packaged—everything,” explains Jeffers.

For producers, that transparency reduces administrative work while giving customers greater confidence in where their products stand throughout the production process. Sociable Cider Werks has experienced that evolution firsthand.

Operations director Olivia Schumack explains how, when Sociable had just a three- or four-person team, they’d package kegs in the daytime, deliver them in the afternoon, and bartend in the evening—that worked just fine. But according to Schumack, Sociable Cider Werks has grown exponentially in the past 10 years and become a copacker. Schumack, whose day-to-day job is managing all those copacking brands, says, “I can’t imagine doing it without Ekos. We knew it was going to be a tool to set us up for success.”

As more beverage producers diversify beyond their own brands, the breweries that thrive will be those that can scale manufacturing partnerships without increasing administrative work.

The Future Belongs to Connected Breweries

For years, brewery technology focused on improving efficiencies in the brewhouse. And that’s still extremely important. But looking ahead, we need to expand the definition of what a brewhouse can do. As we’ve learned, it’s not just about beer. Wine, cider, spirits, THC beverages, and more are integrated into production schedules.

New tech should create connection among all this product chaos. When production, inventory, accounting, payments, ordering, and customer collaboration all work together, breweries spend less time managing administrative work and more time building stronger businesses.

Technology will never replace the creativity, passion, or craftsmanship that defines this industry. But it can give brewers something just as valuable: More time to innovate. More confidence to grow. And more opportunities to build the next generation of successful beverage businesses.

For most of the craft-beer industry’s first 40 years, growth covered up a lot of operational inefficiencies. Demand outpaced supply. Distribution expanded. New taprooms opened seemingly every month. Breweries could rely on spreadsheets, disconnected software, and manual processes because there was always another account to land or another market to enter.

That landscape has changed. According to the Brewers Association’s Mid-Year Report, the number of operating breweries declined 1.8 percent, from 9,515 in 2025 to 9,344 this year, while overall craft-beer volume fell 4 percent during the first half of 2026 compared to the same period last year. New brewery openings also dropped sharply—from 518 in 2024 to just 300 last year. Although brewery closures declined slightly, they remain elevated compared to historical averages.

Breweries today are navigating tighter margins, shifting consumer preferences, rising ingredient costs, and increasing operational complexity. In this environment, technology is no longer a simple convenience, but a competitive advantage.

“You have to get a little grittier and be smart about investments and time,” says Societe Brewing Company VP of brewing Teddy Gowan, who manages multiple teams at the 14-year-old San Diego brewery, from sales to operations to front-of-house—each with their own operational rubrics.

The breweries that separate themselves over the next several years won’t necessarily be the ones brewing the trendiest hazy IPA or the most medal-winning lager. They’ll be the ones making faster, more informed decisions because every department—from production and inventory to sales and accounting—is working from the same source of truth.

One Platform, Limitless Solutions

Walk through almost any brewery today, and it’s not uncommon to find production, logistics, operations, inventory, sales, POS, payroll, and more all operated by separate systems.

Most breweries didn’t intentionally build disconnected operations. They simply added software as they grew: a production platform here, a payments solution there, perhaps a CRM to bridge the gaps, and potentially fermentation or QA analysis software to enhance production.

Individually, those tools often work well. Together, they create blind spots. Every time data have to be entered twice, copied into a spreadsheet, or emailed between departments, breweries lose time, introduce errors, and slow decision-making. The real challenge isn’t the individual software—it’s the fuzzy space between them.

That’s why more breweries are moving away from disconnected systems and toward integrated operational platforms that connect production, inventory, sales, accounting, and reporting into one centralized hub. Instead of every department maintaining its own version of the truth, everyone works from the same real-time data, making collaboration easier and decisions more confident.

Brewery software like Ekos is designed specifically around this philosophy, allowing breweries to connect every stage of production—from grain purchasing through finished sales—inside one system.

“We say Ekos is our universal source of truth,” says Societe’s Gowan, who was a very early adopter of the platform. “It’s the key connection point between sales, operations, and brewing.”

Similarly, for Michael Golden, head of operations at Blockhead Beerworks in Valparaiso, Indiana, switching to a robust brewery management system such as Ekos has made all the difference.

“It’s just been very easy to use,” says Golden, who uses Ekos to manage the brewery’s production calendar, logistical operations, sales and delivery schedule, and more. “Those people with spreadsheets, I don’t understand how they do it. Ekos just makes my life a lot easier.”

It might not be as exciting as releasing the latest double dry-hopped IPA, but building an operation where every team works from connected, accurate information is becoming one of the biggest competitive advantages in modern brewing.

The future of brewing isn’t just about making better beer. It’s about running a better brewery.

The three technology trends below are just the first part of our two-part series, highlighting how breweries are using connected platforms to eliminate busywork, uncover better insights, and ultimately spend less time manually working—and more time making great beverages.

Catch Part II on August 27, 2026, to learn what we predict will be the next three tech trends in the beverage industry next year or share your own thoughts with us in our State of Tech in Craft survey!

Trend #1: The ERP Advantage: How Growing Breweries Get 10 Hours Back Every Week

As breweries expand into new markets, add taprooms, diversify into new beverage categories, or take on copacking, operational complexity grows just as quickly. An enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform helps keep every moving piece connected, giving production, inventory, sales, accounting, and operations a shared view of the business.

By replacing manual data entry, disconnected spreadsheets, and repetitive administrative work with one centralized system, breweries can spend less time managing information and more time making strategic decisions that move the business forward.

For instance, as Sociable Cider Werks in Minneapolis grew from cider to soda, hemp-infused seltzers, and now copacking, and from fewer than a handful of people to about 50 full-timers, keeping track of all the moving parts became too overwhelming and time-consuming.

Before implementing Ekos, the team spent more than a full day logging production information into a paper-based system. What once worked for a small operation became increasingly difficult to manage across multiple product lines and teams.

In 2016, after using pen and paper for three years, Sociable switched to Ekos. Today, as Sociable self distributes its THC seltzers and nonalcoholic brands, Social Cider Werks operations director Olivia Schumack has been using the Ekos Beverage ERP. “I use all the production batches and backend for production planning and producing,” she says.

Most importantly, the brewery estimates the platform saves the team about 10 hours every week that previously went toward manual recordkeeping.

With staff spread across on-site, off-site warehouse, and even remote locations, Sociable likes Ekos because “it provides a central hub that anyone can access from anywhere,” says Schumack. “It allows us to track customers and update things in real time.”

Technology won’t replace great brewing, but it will give great breweries more time to brew and the operational foundation to grow without adding unnecessary complexity. That’s the real ERP advantage setting the standard for the breweries that will thrive in 2027.

Trend #2: Why Data Are the New House Beer

A decade ago, breweries couldn’t brew hazy IPAs fast enough. Every new DDH four-pack or adjuncted 750ml stout release seemed destined to sell out, and success often came down to making the next great beer.

For several years, the market has looked very different. As competition has increased and margins have tightened, instinct alone isn’t enough. The breweries thriving in 2027 won’t just trust their gut—they’ll trust their data.

Connected operational platforms generate an enormous amount of information. The real advantage comes from turning that information into smarter decisions. Instead of exporting spreadsheets, manually cleaning reports, or piecing together data from different teams, breweries with an ERP can access real-time insights that help them forecast demand, manage inventory, monitor costs, and plan production with greater confidence.

MadTree Brewing has embraced exactly that approach. With Ekos, the Cincinnati brewery built custom, comprehensive dashboards that tracked sales and volume by distributor, giving top-level leadership one shared view of the business. “We’re all looking at the same thing,” says MadTree director of brewing operations Ryan Blevins. “This is probably one of my favorite things about [Ekos].”

For Blevins, the value isn’t just seeing more data—it’s making “really good, educated production decisions.”

“I love digging into and getting data that we didn’t have access to [before],” he says.

For instance, Ekos’s data helped MadTree improve its variety-pack production, one of the most operationally complex products many breweries produce. Blevins says MadTree analyzed sales rates with its sales team to get a line on what they thought the growth rate would be and then properly planned production a couple of months ahead of time,

“Overall, Ekos has made it logistically easier for us to manage [our variety packs] from a production standpoint,” says Blevins.

The same principle extends beyond production planning.

At Sociable, Ekos’s reporting tools helped the team accurately calculate product and supply costs without manually maintaining spreadsheets. Schumack says the reporting has “absolutely” saved the company money.

For Societe Brewing, data have become a daily decision-making tool. Gowan relies on reporting to monitor cost of goods, predict upcoming expenses, and quickly identify changes in supplier pricing before they become larger financial issues.

“We’re using it for our forecasting to understand what’s on the invoice next month,” he says. “What does this mean for our team? Do we need to add people? Are we doing okay?”

By using Ekos’s robust inventory and reporting features, Gowan can make smarter business decisions and identify and correct inefficiencies. For instance, with the cost of cans, Gowan says Ekos has been paramount. “I get an email every other week if there’s been an adjustment, so I can go into Ekos and see the true implications,” says Gowan, who calls it helpful to keep an eye on all those little things that can eventually add up to something bigger. “[Ekos] allows you to look at other places and strategize where you can get things to drop down without having to sacrifice quality.”

Previously, identifying those cost changes meant what Gowan calls “tweezer work”—digging through individual batch reports and manually transferring numbers into spreadsheets. Today, Ekos’s automated reporting surfaces those changes almost immediately, allowing the team to react faster and spend more time improving the business instead of hunting for information.

The extra time and efficiency have a trickle-down effect on the business, according to Gowan, who says these decisions became “super-valuable to the bottom line of the business and to the team.”

With the extra time and accurate depiction of cost inputs, Societe’s brewing team can be more creative.

"It becomes a chemistry problem," Gowan says. "You’re not just trying to make the cheapest beer possible, you’re trying to make the best possible beer with the best cost inputs. … It drives a lot of innovation."

The lesson for breweries heading into 2027 is simple: In today’s beer industry, your next competitive advantage probably isn’t hiding in the fermentor; it’s already sitting in your data.

Trend #3: AI Won’t Replace Brewers. It’ll Make Them Better Decision Makers.

The potential power of AI is undeniable, becoming one of the most talked-about technologies. From a business perspective, embracing its endless capabilities could be an untapped superpower.

But the conversation shouldn’t be about replacing people, but rather helping your team make better decisions, faster.

Brewers don’t need AI to write recipes or decide what beer to make next. They need it to eliminate repetitive work, uncover trends buried in thousands of data points, and answer business questions that would normally take hours of digging through spreadsheets.

But for many, the question is: Where do I start? How and in what parts of my business can I sustainably leverage AI to make smarter decisions?

We already know that data are an extremely powerful tool. Crunching numbers, instantly formulating dashboards, and generating predictive models is where large language models (LLMs) really shine.

The next evolution is making that information instantly accessible, where brewers can ask in plain English:

• Which brands had the highest gross margin last quarter?
• Which SKU is growing the fastest?
• How have ingredient costs changed over the past six months?
• Which offerings should we brew more—or less—of next month?

According to Dustin Jeffers, vice president of brewery product & experience at Next Glass, the leading global provider of software, data, eCommerce, and marketing solutions to the beverage-alcohol industry, which acquired Ekos in October last year, that’s exactly where brewery technology is heading.

Beginning next year, Ekos will introduce a Model Context Protocol (MCP), allowing producers to securely connect their operational data with leading AI platforms such as ChatGPT, Claude, and other LLMs.

“You can then create monthly skills, daily artifacts, or anything similar you can do with any of these LLMs with your data that’s inside of Ekos,” explains Jeffers.

Rather than forcing users to learn another reporting interface, MCP creates a bridge between brewery operations and AI, allowing teams to interact with their business data through natural conversation.

Imagine asking your AI assistant to summarize yesterday’s production, identify inventory that’s moving slower than forecast, flag unusual ingredient cost increases, or generate a monthly operations report—all using your own brewery’s data.

The breweries that embrace AI in 2027 will spend less time searching for answers and more time acting on them.

The Foundation for Smarter Brewing

The future of brewing technology doesn’t replace craftsmanship, but it does give beverage producers better tools to execute their craft.

The first wave of innovation is focused on helping breweries build a stronger operational foundation. Currently, connected ERP systems eliminate repetitive work and provide real-time analytics to transform raw information into confident business decisions. In the future, AI will make those insights more accessible than ever, helping teams spend less time digging through reports and more time acting on what matters.

Together, these technologies create something every brewery is looking for: simplicity. Simplifying operations, simplifying production, and simplifying data analysis helps producers make smarter decisions to grow.

But operating more intelligently is only the beginning. In Part II, we’ll explore how those same connected systems are transforming the way beverage companies get paid, sell to retailers, and manage increasingly complex copacking partnerships. Because once your operations are connected, every other part of the business can become more connected, too.