When you decide to start a brewery, there will be hundreds of problems to work through. One of those will be the technology you’ll need to power your craft brewery.
What is the best brewery POS software?
- Revel Systems POS
- Upserve
- Lavu POS
- Arryved
- VicinityBrew
- Rezku
- Brew POS
Among those pieces of brewery equipment and technology will be your POS system – or point of sale software. As software continues to take over the world, there are now specific POS software tools for specific verticals, including breweries.
What is a Brewery POS?
A brewery POS system provides a simple solution to taking customer orders and processing payments for multiple customer checks simultaneously. They also allow taproom managers and owners to schedule employees, check inventory, report sales analytics, and managing the entire customer checkout experience.
Brewmasters and taproom owners benefit from choosing a brewery-centric POS software because these platforms are built with their needs in mind. Systems built for similar businesses, like a restaurant or retail POS systems, may have the same basic transactional features but lack the solutions that are unique to breweries. An example of this is quality control of a beer ingredients.
Many POS systems also integrate and communicate with delivery services to handle the delivery experience.
Brewery POS systems can come in many different formats. Products such as Square plug directly into a tablet device. Almost all brewpub and taproom POS systems are cloud-based and offer mobile solutions.
Legacy POS systems are completely on-premise hardware devices that look similar to old-school computers and cash registers.
Left: An on-premise, hardware POS. Right: A mobile-POS system
More sophisticated POS systems include a centralized on-premise system, but also include mobile tables that servers can take directly to guests at their table.
7 Best Brewery POS Systems in 2021
While there are many POS tools that are industry agnostic (such as Square and Toast), we have curated a list of brewery-specific point of sale systems that cater to its platforms specifically for craft breweries. We’ve also used review-rating scores from G2 to help us rank each craft brewery POS software.
1. Revel Systems POS
Review Rating: 4.1 out of 5
Overview: Revel‘s POS system targets restaurants, wineries, breweries, distilleries and more. It offers features such as easy checkout, dashboards for reporting customer spending trends, and a CRM that helps manage customer data.
Revel has focused attention on its product’s brewery features, marketing their product as a brewery-specific POS and including ingredient level inventory management and the capabilities to sell beer by the glass, growler, or case.
Price: $99/month per terminal for the starter package.
2. Upserve
Review Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Overview: Upserve is a cloud-based POS system built specifically for restaurant owners, it’s feature set is perfect for taproom managers and craft brewery staff. In fact, Upserve offers a complete, all-in-one restaurant management experience in its platform.
On top of being a point-of-sale system, it provides solutions for workforce management, inventory management, loyalty programs, marketing automation, and data reports on customer spending habits. It also integrates with popular brewery software including 7shifts, Resy, Bevspot, TapHunter, and Beer Saver.
Price: $59/month for the starter package
3. Lavu POS
Review Rating: 3.3 out of 5
Overview: Lavu POS is a point-of-sale app built for restaurants, but actively supports bars, breweries, cideries, and more. It offers all the standard POS features such as ordering and payments, as well as inventory management, reporting, loyalty reward programs, and more.
Lavu is also available on the iOS app store and can be run entirely from its mobile app on an iPhone or iPad.
Price: $69/month for one terminal
4. Arryved
Review Rating: n/a
Overview: Arryved is a relatively new POS system that is built explicitly for the craft brewers industry. In fact, the company worked with the craft industry to build its platform and roadmap new product features.
It is a fully-mobile POS app that can integrate with both tablets and smartphones. The Arryved Portal gives taproom and brewery staff the tools to report and monitor their customers’ spending habits, sales data, and inventory.
Price: n/a
5. VicinityBrew
Review Rating: n/a
Overview: VicinityBrew is a brewery-specific POS system. Its tagline is “Software Fit for Fermentation”, which craft brewmasters should love. VicinityBrew is an all-in-one solution for all daily operations of a brewery or taproom, including beer-formula management, variations in packaging and specific brews, multi-stage production runs, employee scheduling, supply chain, reporting, compliance, and more.
Another benefit of the POS app is its integrations with Microsoft Dynamics and Quickbooks, as well as being a partner of the large associations in the brewery industry such as the Brewers Association and the Pink Boots Society.
Price: n/a
6. Rezku POS
Review Rating: n/a
Overview: Rezku POS is a full-service POS for restaurants, bars, night clubs, breweries, and more. On top of the basic POS features, it also gives taproom managers the tools to manage their operations, inventory, security, and employee scheduling.
While Rezku targets multiple industries, its brewery-focused features are impressive. It has tools to monitor pour consistency and how to make the most of limited taps and space. It’s also fully integrated with iOS systems and prefers to run on iPads.
Price: $69 for a single license
7. BrewPOS
Review Rating: n/a
Overview: BrewPOS is an old school POS system made for the brewery industry. While all point-of-sale apps up until this point have been cloud or mobile systems, BrewPOS is an on-premise solution that comes in the form of a piece of hardware that looks like a traditional bar computer-like interface.
BrewPOS offers all the expected features of POS software, such as bill splitting, modifying menu items, and inventory tracking. However, it looks to be a quite dated piece of technology, which most brewers would notice from it’s, uh, retro-looking website.
Price: $69 for a single hardware station
Importance of Selecting the Right Brewery POS
The software buying process is not enjoyable, and making the wrong decision can be expensive and haunt brewpubs.
Make sure to do due diligence in your research. Consider making a shortlist of potential POS apps at the beginning of your research process. Create a list of must-have features and a price range. From there, search for customer reviews of the platforms and try to filter those reviews by brewery owners and employees.
When you finally do make your POS selection, be sure to reward yourself with a freshly poured ale.
