Breweries are wet buildings
Brewery floors are washed constantly. Pallets sitting in a brewhouse absorb water from below, which means a pallet that looks fine on top can be saturated in its stringers. Those are the units that fail in a rack.
Our standard advice: never store pallets on a brewery floor overnight. Get them onto a dry staging area or outside under cover. This single habit change extends pallet life by a year or more.
Keg loads are point loads
A half-barrel keg weighs about 160 pounds full and concentrates that weight on a small base. Four kegs on a pallet is not a 640-pound distributed load; it is four point loads sitting wherever they happen to land.
If the kegs land between stringers, deck boards bear the whole thing in bending. We recommend loading kegs over the stringers and specifying thicker decking — or using a 42×42 beverage footprint, which exists precisely because round product centres better on a square deck.
Case stacking and the overhang problem
Case-goods breweries run into the classic overhang trap. A case pattern that overhangs the deck by an inch loses a meaningful share of its compression strength, and the damage shows up at a distributor's warehouse three handling events later.
Measure the loaded unit. If the pattern overhangs, either change the pattern or change the footprint. We have redesigned pallet specs for several breweries purely to fix an inch.
The returnable question
Self-distributing breweries get their pallets back and should run a proper closed loop: delivery truck leaves with empties, pool sized on cycle time, repairs batched quarterly.
Breweries distributing through a wholesaler usually never see the pallet again, which makes them one-way consumers. Those breweries should buy the cheapest grade that survives the trip, which is almost always a Grade B rather than an A.
What breweries teach us about upcycling
Taprooms are our best upcycling customers, and they have excellent instincts: they want the wood to look like what it was. We have built bar fronts, flight boards, shelving and crate walls from pallets that came out of the same brewery's own loading dock.
A taproom wall built from your own retired pallets, with the Passport IDs readable, is the cheapest brand story in hospitality.