Craft beer is down. There will be winners. Will you be one of them?
Chain reset season is March, April, and May. If you don't win the reset, you don't win the year. Velocity gains cannot offset the PODs you never got. The math doesn't work that way.
Built by Mike Woodard — owned the demand plan at New Belgium for twelve years; finishing as their Senior Demand Planning Leader. $500M+ revenue, 500+ distributors, and 600K+ Points of Distribution. Core member of the Bell's integration team. Founding member of New Belgium's data governance committee. Instrumental to the success of the largest launches in the history of craft with numerous number ones. Now helping grow the wider craft community.
The Forecast Room is a demand planning tool built to surface what your numbers are actually telling you — so you can make the right moves before the window closes.
Statistical forecasting built for how breweries actually operate
Multiplicative decomposition and Holt-Winters exponential smoothing with auto-fitted parameters. Adjust trend and seasonality strength per item. Missing data gets specific prompts, not errors.
Every brand on one chart. Sort by volume, trend, or share of total. Click any row to open its forecast. The view a VP of Sales actually needs in the Monday meeting.
Portfolio rollup with confidence intervals, LTM actuals vs. forward forecast, and method detail per SKU. The number that goes in the board deck and the bank covenant.
Pick an analog item, set your POD ramp and scale factor, and get base/upside/downside scenarios instantly. Build the plan before you commit to the production run.
On-hand inventory against forecast velocity. Red means you're running out. The conversation you need to have with your production planner before it becomes an emergency.
This is what a dying brand looks like when the sales team thinks it's thriving
Year 1 — Freshman Superstar
Year 2 — The Sophomore Slump
The sales team added 30 doors. Volume dropped 41%. 7,200+ cases are sitting in distributor inventory. The shipment-to-depletion gap continues to widen every month but nobody flagged it because PODs were still trending up.
Velocity collapse masked by distribution growth is the single most common way mid-size craft breweries misread brand health. Before reset season is even complete, distributor Weeks of Inventory explodes, shipments grind to a halt, and a once-promising brand is finished. And becomes a write-off. Don't be the last to know.
For 12 years, I led demand planning at New Belgium Brewing, growing alongside the company as it expanded from a single brewery to a four-site, multi-supplier national network. With the network shipping over 1M units per month, I built the forecasting framework that production, sales, and finance continue to operate today.
The Forecast Room is the tool I wanted back then. It is not a generic BI tool adapted for beer. It is purpose-built and streamlined for the way craft breweries actually make decisions. The statistical engine runs the same methods I used at scale. The missing-data prompts are the questions I would ask in a planning meeting.
Today I run a consulting practice focused on S&OP and demand planning for craft beverage alcohol, helping breweries move from reactive to predictive using the same methodologies that drove New Belgium's results.
In Tamarron's 2024 annual survey of hundreds of beer distributors,
New Belgium ranked:
- #1 in Forecasting
- #1 in Logistics
- #1 in Inventory
- #2 in Supply Chain Leadership
7-Eleven is the largest beer-selling chain in the country. In 2022, New Belgium earned their top supplier honor across the total alcohol category, recognized for dollar growth, in-stock performance, and supply chain execution.
"Operations & logistics for planning, production, and shipping purposes... none of it is possible without all of your hard work."
— Michael Corrigan, Chief Sales Officer, New Belgium Brewing · February 2023
Be first in on launch day.
Sign up and we'll send you access to The Forecast Room on March 30 — with the Evenfall Brewing demo data pre-loaded, including the Sundown IPA story above. Explore the tool, then upload your own distributor data.
One email on launch day. No spam. No sequence.
We'll send you access to The Forecast Room on March 30. Keep an eye on your inbox — or reply directly if you have questions before then.