This is a bit of a "potpourri". Not that we are running out of ideas by the way. "Potpourri" is made up of 2 French words meaning "rotten pot"! We wonder why that came to be.
Rotation of Stock:
Sounds boring, right? Maybe, but not to us. Proper stock rotation to ensure product freshness is essential in our business. We have a system in place using a 5-3-1 formula. When ordering, multiples of these numbers are used from the best movers to the slower ones.
This method becomes especially useful for the summer season, which is slower than the rest of the year as people tend to sip on the deck or at the lake and forget to restock. The upside is that our products are fresher – the downside is that using the formula can result in shortages when irregular selling trends occur. Even in slow season however, we are not more than 2 weeks away from ordering.
A number of years back, we learned a bitter (and expensive) lesson about overstocking. We were offered a good "deal" on a bulk number of wine kits. Why not offer a great price and move it? For the customers, that would be great. But not really. A month or so later, we started getting phone calls: it won’t clear; it tastes like water etc etc. We had one going as well, and they were right! The problem was all the same, the kits had become oxidized due to their age. We then were replacing at no charge, and fielding many phone calls. This became quite distressing – which is when the forklift came in to play. 120 kits were taken to their funeral at the bin at the back of the store. Sometimes a few dollars "saved" is hundreds wasted. Needless to say, we no longer carry this company’s products.
Best Before dates:
How would we know about 5000 year old "live yeast"? Discovery channel of course!
Often we see a Best Before date on yeast sachets. What exactly does it mean? It means that the product is BEST before that date, not bad after. It is basically a legal requirement most useful on perishables such as steak or pork chops. Now, to the point. A group of archeologists excavating a tomb in Egypt found urns with a powder on the bottom. Under the microspe it was found that the powder looked like yeast cells. So, being scientists they decided to cultivate these cells to determine if they were still alive. Lo and behold, once in a petrie dish some started multiplying! You see, a single yeast cell splits in two every four hours. After 24 hours, you have 64 cells, and after that 5000+! And how many cells does a 3 gram bag of yeast have? A few hundred thousand to start with, and after a few days, millions in a single batch of wine.
And what did the scientist do with the yeast? They made beer!
Armand
P.S: If you have an article you would like to submit, or a question researched, please do send it to us at info@moonshiners.mb.ca