That honestly sounds like the way to go, and I’ll probably look into it when I have more time. I’m more a software person than a sysadmin and I’m not wildly confident that I won’t accidentally close us down for a few days without a lot of prep. 😆

Inventory is through our POS/processor and production records are through Beer30 (though I have plans to write my own and open source it when I have time; we just opened and we’re all still running pretty hard doing new-open stuff). We’re also technically a nano-brewery, so anything we’re doing is a little bespoke (i.e., I think it’s a very situational setup) right now.

The biggest thing from a brewery-specific side that we’re doing is controlling the brewhouse. We’re running an all-electric system, and all the heating and cellar controls expose UIs over the LAN. In addition to being generally nifty, we’re using Unifi to separate brewery-specific stuff onto its own network and the built-in VPN hosting (I opted for the OpenVPN option) to expose that network security. This allows our brewer to do stuff like check the temperature from home or set the boil kettle to start running before he leaves the house. (The useful thing about the UDM (primary server) running Alpine is that I have a task that essentially functions as dynamic DNS and updates an A record with our domain provider so he can always log in at a known hostname).

It also integrates with cameras, phone, and menu boards, which are all useful for the FoH side of things.

All-in-all, we’re not doing that much with it yet, but it’s pretty nice to use so far, and being a software engineer, I’m excited for the possibilities of useful stuff I can host on it.

I’ve been using Ubiquiti/Unifi for my brewery setup (cameras, several private networks, phone tree stuff). It comes with some pretty solid management software accessible through the local network, but under the hood, everything’s just running Alpine. There’s a bit of a learning curve if you keep the management software installed (firmware updates wipe out the crontab, for example), but you can customize it pretty aggressively if you know your way around a terminal.

I think laziness probably played a role, at least early on. There was an experiment in the 1960s (using a very loose definition of that word in the modern sense) which looked at harvesting grain in the Fertile Crescent using stone age tools. They found you could get about 1 kg of usable grain an hour that way, which would produce a slight surplus of calories for a year for a single person in about 200 hours (the number I saw was 3 weeks, but I did some back of the napkin math to check it). Barring the complications of figuring out how to actually store that much grain all at once, and actually learning to cultivating it intentionally, it seems like it might have been preferable to foraging constantly for some folks. Plus, it probably would have proven to be a more stable food source once people figured out storage, so lean months would have been a bit easier.

It was shortsighted laziness, though, because farming is definitely hard work, and likely no one expected it to become such a huge time sink.

https://belleten.gov.tr/tam-metin/1322/eng (Sorry for the slightly weird source; I couldn’t find the original paper not behind a paywall, but it seems like a not-terrible journal)