Brewery maintenance best practices

Keeping brewing equipment clean, reliable, and compliant isn’t easy — especially when production rarely slows down. 

Whether you’re managing a small craft brewery or a large-scale production facility, staying ahead of maintenance challenges requires intentional planning, clear communication, and the right tools. These best practices will help your team reduce downtime, stay compliant, and keep quality high — even during your busiest production runs.

1) Schedule maintenance around brewing and fermentation cycles

Fermentation tanks and brewhouse systems are often in use for long, uninterrupted stretches, making maintenance access unpredictable. Without coordination, maintenance work either gets delayed or interrupts production — neither is sustainable.

A few things to keep in mind to simplify brewery maintenance scheduling:

• Review the brewing and fermentation schedule weekly with production leads.
• Identify predictable low-activity windows (e.g., post-transfer, pre-fill downtime) and block time for maintenance in advance.
• Set up a calendar view that clearly shows tank availability windows to make maintenance planning more manageable and predictable..

Proactively aligning your maintenance plan with brewing cycles helps prevent delays, avoid production conflicts, and ensure that essential PMs get done on time.

2) Use shift-based scheduling to stay productive around the clock

Most breweries operate in multiple shifts, especially in packaging and kegging. Without a shift-based plan, tasks can pile up unevenly or be missed entirely when crews rotate.

Here’s what you can do:

• Build shift templates based on your actual labor schedule (e.g., 3x8s, 2x12s).
• Assign PMs during lower-traffic times within each shift (e.g., mid-morning, early afternoon).
• Use Sockeye’s crew availability features to balance assignments across shifts and avoid overloading one team.
• Reevaluate shift loads weekly to adjust for changes in staff availability.

Shift-structured scheduling ensures consistent maintenance coverage, reduces burnout, and prevents critical work from falling through the cracks during shift changes.

3) Make sanitation and compliance tasks part of your PM routine

Sanitation, safety, and compliance aren’t optional — and they can’t be managed informally. Tasks like filter sanitization, CIP validation, and temperature calibration need to be planned and tracked just like mechanical PMs.

You should:

• Create PM templates for compliance-related work: CIP checks, CO2 venting, filter flushes, thermometer calibrations, etc.
• Use Sockeye to assign these to specific roles (e.g., cellar crew, packaging techs).
• Keep digital records of every sanitation-related work order for compliance and traceability. You can even schedule pre-inspection audits to confirm that all regulatory PMs are up to date.

By formalizing sanitation and compliance into your maintenance plan, you ensure consistent execution and audit readiness — while also protecting product quality.

4) Prioritize work based on equipment criticality

Not every asset deserves equal attention. If your chiller fails, it’s a crisis. If a hose clamp breaks, it can probably wait.

Get back to the basics:

• Categorize assets into 3 to 5 priority levels. For example: Critical, High, Medium, and Low.
• Schedule work orders and PMs based on equipment criticality and production impact.
• Track and regularly review work order delay reasons to identify gaps in planning, staffing, or other root causes that are leading you off track.

Smart prioritization helps you focus limited resources where they’ll have the biggest impact.

5) Actively manage your backlog

Every brewery has a backlog — it’s a natural part of operations. However, it should be organized, visible, and actionable. This is a prerequisite to making sure it doesn’t get out of hand.

What to do:

• Review your backlog every week: sort by asset type, criticality, and work type.
• When cleaning out the backlog, break larger tasks into smaller, schedulable steps with clear due dates.
• To effectively reduce backlog, you will want to sprinkle in some of the work between regular PMs. For example, each week, each crew has 10% of its availability reserved for backlog tasks.
• Track preventive vs reactive ratios monthly — aim to keep reactive work under 30% of total hours.

An organized deferred maintenance strategy helps you stay in control and ensure your team is always moving the needle — even when time is tight.

6) Use visual scheduling to improve coordination

Miscommunication about what work is happening (and when) can lead to missed PMs, duplicated tasks, or unplanned downtime. A visual, shared schedule helps ensure everyone — maintenance, production, and sanitation — stays aligned.

Actions to consider:

• Create a digital schedule that is easy to share (read: visible to all departments) and is always up-to-date.
• Color-code tasks by type (e.g., mechanical, sanitation, inspections) to reduce confusion.
• Include shift notes and updates directly in the schedule view to improve handoffs between crews.
• Encourage techs to check the live schedule at the start of each shift so they know what’s expected.

Visual scheduling keeps everyone on the same page, reduces confusion during shift changes, and creates a shared source of truth for work execution. It builds accountability and streamlines communication across teams.