Working at the brewery now for almost three years now, I get in the habit of streamlining and trying to add efficiencies where it makes sense. Sometimes that means coming up with strange metrics that may not make much sense to the average beer drinker. I’ll share one that we have, but only recently started paying close attention to.
We strongly focus on curating our menu, and this means making sure we have the right selection of seasonals, a good mix of IPAs, a few interesting sours, etc. This planning takes place months ahead of time, is well-documented, and generally gets executed according to plan.
However, historically we have NOT focused as intently on the ABV of all the above beers. And the casual observer in Autumn Arch over the last few weeks may see that we are currently on the heavy end of ABV…..way too many 8% (or higher) beers on tap, even for the winter season.
Enter my new metric - Average ABV. Simply an average of all the ABVs on the menu at any given time. Targeting this metric around 6.5% tends to give a nice mix of low, medium, and high ABV beers, so this is the sweet spot we try to target with our best intentions.
Where are we now? As of Sunday night, we clocked in at a strong 7.5% to the delight of strong beer lovers everywhere and to the dismay of most folks looking for more than one pint on a given evening.
But things are changing. January features a slew of lower ABV beers. We have a delightful Gose that released last week, a “table hazy” releasing this week, and 3 new beers in cans releasing next week all at 7% or less. Just like daylight hours in January, I’d say we are trending in the right direction on beer strength.