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Brothers Drake Meadery

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For our Gemba paper, we choose to take an inside look at how Brothers Drake Meadery, an urban producer of wines made from honey, produces meads and creates its local business. In order to put forward useful suggestions from a better understanding about the production process, we visited Brothers Drake Meadery located on 26 E 5th Ave. Brothers Drake Meadery’s business contains meadery, bar, event space for rent, and venue for live music event.
As a popular wine among tourists and wine-lovers in Columbus, mead not only uses local ingredients and supplies for brewing, but also is only distributed locally. Mead is that uses. Using honey as its primary source, mead as an ancient beverage is considered to be the ancestor of all fermented …show more content…

In the case of Brothers Drake Meadery, the unpasteurized raw honey from the Bowling Green area of central Ohio is used to make wine-style mead. Every single year, Brothers Drake buys 30,000 pounds of unpasteurized honey by contacting with local farmers individually instead of using the assistance of agents for more effective communication. Taking advantage of his originality, Mr. Meadery can always bring up new ideas. Instead of making only plain flavor, this meadery provides some innovative flavors such as apple and ginger. What’s more, in order to prevent from wasting, Mr. Meadery also uses one-gallon container to test the new recipes, and only when these recipes are proved to be workable and with good taste, they will be delivered to production line for mass …show more content…

Mr. Meadery has great passion for mead; as a matter of fact, he sees the recipe generation part as the most important part of his business. It is indeed this unique, innovative process that supports his business; however, it is undeniable that there are some problems generating from this process.
On the one hand, the random new recipe testing schedule wastes lots of time, and sometimes makes it fail to meet customer demand on time. The production process is relatively standard, which asks for a long time for brewing and aging. However, once staffs start to produce new mead, they can only make one flavor at a time in the whole metal container.
On the other hand, all labor forces are assigned to keep producing the mead due to Mr. Meadery’s focus on increasing the utilization of existing equipment. However, the bottling is quite a labor-intensive process that will cost lots of money to employ more labors.
Besides, stores that sell their bottled mead do not have good sales plan, which makes Brothers Drake Meadery fail to track the sales of each flavor and make better plans for next production.

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