Drafted 2026-10-13 by the hub's orchestrating agent from the nomination research, for the maintainer to edit. The project is in research: nothing here is an approved scope. Sourced statements carry a link; the fuller evidence register is in research.md.
User. The person at a small United States brewery who keeps the records the federal regulator requires: often the owner or head brewer, working from brew sheets and spreadsheets. About 9,800 craft breweries were operating in 2024 (Brewers Association). Wineries and distilleries carry the same duty under different forms and are a later audience.
Task. Keep production, removal and inventory records through the period, then prepare the Brewer's Report of Operations (TTB Form 5130.9) and the excise tax return, and enter them at the government's payment portal.
Why it matters. The report is a legal obligation, and brewers describe spending days getting spreadsheet records into the form's shape (forum thread). The tools that do it are subscription suites. The best known, Ekos, was acquired in October 2025 with a two-year price freeze for existing customers (announcement). The research found no maintained free and open-source project that does this.
Not yet established. How many small brewers file monthly and how many quarterly, what the subscription tools cost a small brewery today (the prices found were second-hand), and how much work state reports add.
Hub nomination: 508-dev/genairosity#77.
The founding maintainer asked for this repository on 2026-10-13, after a reviewed research
summary was posted on that issue. The issue then carried the nomination:researching
label; the acceptance comment and label change are the maintainer's to record. This
repository is not yet registered in the hub's projects.json.
Proposed first workflow, pending a maintainer scope decision and an approved specification:
- Record brews, transfers, packaging, removals (taxable and tax-free), losses and inventory in a local ledger.
- At period end, compute each line of Form 5130.9 from the ledger, and show which records feed each line.
- Produce a filled copy of the report and the figures for the excise return, for a person to review and enter at the portal.
- Keep each period's records and filed figures as an audit trail.
The tool keeps records and fills forms. It does not file. The regulator's guide describes entering the form field by field at the portal (TTB excise guide), and the research found no bulk-upload format, so a person always submits.
Open scope decisions for the maintainer:
- Beer only at first, as the research recommends, or wine and spirits from the start.
- Whether to pilot one state's report, and which state.
- Whether to import the spreadsheets brewers already keep.
Exclusions:
- Electronic submission to any authority, and payment of tax.
- State reports in the first version.
- Label approvals and formula filings.
- Sales, purchasing, customer management and the rest of a brewery management suite.
- Tax advice. The filer, or their accountant, is responsible for what is filed.
| Project | License | What it does | Fit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brewtarget | GPL-3.0, active | Recipe formulation | No production records or reporting |
| CraftBeerPi | GPL-3.0 | Brewing automation | A different job |
| Kegbot | MIT, active | Tap and keg monitoring | A different job |
| broply-compliance-tool | MIT | A federal compliance wizard for small breweries | On point, but created and last pushed on one day in April 2026, with no stars |
Searches of GitHub and five other software forges found nothing maintained that covers production records plus the operations report. An absence claim this broad stays provisional.
- Platform: an open decision. The research reads these users as working on Windows and Mac laptops, and suggests a cross-platform desktop application or a self-hosted web application. The hub prefers Linux-first desktop. The maintainer settles this before a specification is written.
- Usability. Someone who can keep a spreadsheet can keep these records, and every figure on the report can be traced back to the records behind it.
- Performance. No targets yet; a small brewery's data is small.
- Stack. Not chosen. Rust is preferred where it fits. A single brewery needs no server. No AI feature is planned.
- Data handling. Production and tax records are confidential business data. Local by default. Tests use synthetic breweries only.
The maintainer is recorded in genairosity.json. Work is selected by interest, evidence, and available time; profitability is not required. No warranty is provided.
The first research task, from the nomination research: take Form 5130.9 and its instructions, build one synthetic brewery's report for a quarter by hand, and reconcile every line against the form's published definitions. That fixes the units and the mapping from records to lines before any product code is written.