Distributors, Producers, Products, and Styles
The catalog is BevWerk’s descriptive layer. It records facts about beer that stay true between deliveries, so inventory records can point at them instead of repeating them.
Distributors
Section titled “Distributors”Who you buy from. A Distributor carries contact details — Email, Phone — and a Keg Deposit.
That deposit field is the one worth setting carefully. It is what makes the money side of Distribution meaningful: without it, an empty keg in your cooler is just an empty keg rather than a specific amount of your money waiting to come back.
Producers
Section titled “Producers”Who makes the beer. A Producer has a Display Name, a location (City, Country), and a type — Brewery, Cidery, and so on.
Producers matter to guests more than most catalog data. A menu that names the brewery and where it is from is doing work that a beer name alone cannot.
Products
Section titled “Products”What a producer makes. A Product carries a Display Name, a Description, style information, and specifications such as Plato.
Products are the record inventory actually points at. When a beer arrives again next season, you add a new inventory record against the same Product rather than describing the beer a second time — which is why a Product’s details are worth getting right once.
Clone helps when a producer’s range shares most of its details and differs in a few.
Styles
Section titled “Styles”How beer is classified. A Style has a name and a Type, and grouping by style is what lets a guest scanning a long list find the kind of thing they are in the mood for.
How they connect
Section titled “How they connect”Distributor → who sold it to you. Producer → who made it. Product → what it is. Style → what kind it is. An inventory record points at a Product and adds what is true of that particular keg or case.
Fix a producer’s name once and every menu, report, and inventory record referring to it is correct. That is the entire argument for a catalog: the alternative is the same beer spelled three ways across four menus.
Deactivating rather than deleting
Section titled “Deactivating rather than deleting”Catalog records can be deactivated and hidden with Hide Deactivated rather than removed. A seasonal beer you will pour again next year should be deactivated, not deleted — deleting it would orphan the history of every keg you already sold.
What to do next
Section titled “What to do next”- Turn catalog records into stock you own in
Add and edit inventory items. - See the wider workflow in
Manage your catalog.