A beer system that coped through winter is not the same as a system that is ready for summer. Throughput goes up. Cellar temperature goes up. Half the people pouring started three weeks ago. The system gets no say in any of it.
Routine beer system maintenance in spring is the window to sort that out. Once the first hot weekend arrives you are managing the problem rather than preventing it.
In a single month, Barons carried out 45 installs, 116 beer line cleans and 157 service calls. That is what the run into summer looks like from this side of it, and it is the reason to book early rather than in December.
Here is the order to work through it.
Book the service before the diary fills
Service slots are finite and every venue in Perth wants the same fortnight. Booking now gets you a date you choose rather than a date you are given.
Ask for a full system check rather than a line clean on its own. A line clean sorts what is in the lines. It does not tell you whether the cooling will hold in February.
If your beer line cleaning interval has slipped over winter, say so when you book. It changes what the technician looks for.
Check the cooling can hold temperature in a hot cellar
Cooling that copes at 18 degrees ambient is not proof it will cope at 35. Most summer foam problems start here, not at the tap.
Check the cellar holds temperature through the hottest part of the day rather than first thing in the morning. Check it again with the door opening as often as it will in December.
If it loses ground now it will lose more later. This is the check most worth doing early, because the fix is the slowest one to arrange.
Review the tap list against the summer menu
Summer changes what sells. Lighter beer moves faster, heavier beer slows down, and a tap pouring slowly is a quality problem before it is a sales problem.
Look at turnover on every tap, not only the popular ones. The line that moves once a fortnight will be the one that tastes wrong on a Saturday.
If the summer list needs more taps than you have, start that conversation now. Adding taps in December is not a same-week job.
Sort the gas
Gas goes faster at volume. Check what you hold on site, check what can be delivered at short notice, and check the supply arrangement still matches what you actually pour.
Anything involving regulators, gas boards or pressure settings goes to a technician. That is not a job to save money on.
Get the seasonal crew trained before they start
New staff learn to pour on your busiest nights unless you decide otherwise. That is where waste comes from, and it is where the queue comes from too.
Cover the pour, glassware, the keg change, and what they should not touch. Sessions run on site across WA or at the Canning Vale training space, capped at 12 people.
If last summer was a struggle, this is the window
If the system struggled last summer, it will struggle again. Nothing about it got easier over winter.
Spring is the last honest moment to change it before peak. A replacement planned in September is a very different job to one arranged in a panic in January, and a marginal system is worth looking at properly rather than nursing through another season. Repeated foam across every tap, cooling that cannot hold, or a system that cannot take another tap all point at the commercial beer systems conversation rather than another service call.
Get ahead of the summer rush
Barons runs a 24-hour on-call service and works with venues across WA from a base in Canning Vale. Book your beer system service, then work through the pre-summer cellar checklist with your team.