An efficiency and sustainability consultant you could not justify hiring, for the days a month you actually need one.

A craft producer at three or ten thousand hectoliters has the same efficiency problems as a plant ten times the size and none of the staff to work them. A full-time process engineer is not affordable. A large consultancy will sell you a template, apply it, send a different consultant each visit, and price it against a plant with a corporate sustainability department. This sits between the two: a named consultant, a standing number of days each month, and recommendations built from your plant's own numbers.

What it is

Standing days, not a project

You buy days, not deliverables. The days are booked in advance, they recur, and what gets worked on is decided against the backlog rather than against a statement of work agreed before anyone had seen the plant.

The same consultant every meeting

Continuity is most of the value

Someone who knows that your glycol loop was rebalanced in March, that the mash tun meter reads high, and which of last year's ideas your head brewer rejected and why. That knowledge is what a rotating consultant cannot bring and an in-house hire would take a year to build.

A live backlog, worked in order

Ranked by return, not by novelty

Every visit closes something and adds what it found. Procedure and scheduling changes first because they need almost no capital; metered capital measures next, with the incentive paperwork filed as part of the day rather than as an extra.

The reporting kept current

Not a scramble every time someone asks

The Efficiency Platform — its Tier 1 monthly tracking included — is maintained between visits, so when a retailer, lender or grant program asks for figures, they already exist and can be defended line by line.

Why the middle

A boutique is cheaper than a large firm and more specific than one.

A large consultancy carries the cost of the office, the bench of juniors and the sales function, and it recovers that cost by reusing one methodology across many clients. That is a rational business, and it produces a competent generic answer — which is often the wrong answer for a plant whose water problem is a cracked-open valve on a condenser loop nobody has metered.

A boutique has none of that overhead to recover, which is why it costs less, and it takes few enough clients that the engineer can hold your plant in their head, which is why the answer is specific. Those are the same fact seen from two sides. What you give up is bench depth: for a structural, seismic or electrical design question you need a firm with those licenses, and we will say so and point you to one rather than improvising.

Against a full-time hire. A process engineer's salary, benefits and tools against a few days a month. Below roughly twenty thousand hectoliters there is not enough efficiency work to keep busy.
Against a large firm. No proposal cycle, no engagement manager, no different consultant on the second visit. The rate is lower and the hours go into the plant rather than into the deck.
Against nothing. The usual alternative. The utility bill goes up quietly, the ratio drifts, and the first anyone looks is when a lender or a buyer asks for numbers nobody has.

How it is bought

Priced in hours, cancellable, with the first month scoped from your bills.

Retainers are quoted after a look at twelve months of utility bills and a production number — the same two things that start any engagement here — because the number of days a plant needs is not guessable from its size alone.

Start here

Send twelve months of bills and a production number.

From those we can tell you roughly how many days a month your plant would use, and whether a one-off engagement would serve you better than a retainer.

Ask about a retainer See the method first