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Getting started

How much time it actually takes

By Dwight Davis, Founder

Updated

On this page5

Making is quick, fermenting is not, and filling is where the hours go.

Three clocks

Production time, fermentation time and testing time, and only the first is under your control.

The batch

Extract, blend, adjust, treat: a few hours for a batch.

Then chilling, which for a large volume is hours more and is waiting rather than work.

Then filling, capping, sealing, labeling and packing, which exceeds the making and is per bottle.

Fermentation is calendar time

A ferment takes the days it takes, and the rate depends on temperature and on the culture rather than on your schedule.

Which means capacity is vessels times turnaround, and you cannot make more by working longer.

It also means a production plan has to start a week or two before the demand, and a busy weekend has to be anticipated rather than reacted to.

A realistic week

One or two production sessions.

A separate filling and labeling session, longer than the making.

Deliveries, which for a chilled product is a round rather than a courier drop.

Testing and records.

And the retained samples doing their work in the background, which is the part that takes months and no labor at all.

References

No published source. This page is written from practice rather than from published guidance. No extension service or agency publishes on this question for beverages, so nothing here is cited, and it should be weighed as experience and not as a standard.
Written from the federal regulation and agency guidance named on each page, not from a laboratory. Whether a particular product meets a pathogen reduction requirement, and what its alcohol content actually is, are measurements about your product, and this is not those measurements.