About JCDigital: IT and Consulting Experts for Breweries

About Us

We are a unique company with an eclectic portfolio. We specialize in software development, data science, and management consulting, but we are also enthusiastic brewers with experience across a broad scale of beer brewing. Most of all, we are crazy about the craft brewing industry. We love the people, we love the commitment, we love the community, and we love the garage band attitude. Our vision is to lean in and help complete that picture, bringing new skills to the industry so we can all keep this going through today's challenges as well as tomorrow's.

JCDigital was founded by us...a husband and wife team (Rachael and Jason Carpenter), chasing a dream of business ownership. Rachael works for the University of Missouri in St Louis, with degrees in Public Policy Administration and Data Science for Political Science, and she is actively working on her Master's in Political Science. Her passion is food policy and agricultural policy, and she is working hard to get into her PhD program and focus on research in these areas. She brings deep knowledge in food systems and agricultural supply chains with a flair for sourcing, analyzing, and visualizing data. She's also the author of a totally awesome dark mild ale recipe.

Jason's education is in hardware and software systems as well as organizational management, with a Bachelor's in Computer Science, and a MS in Information Technology Management. He spent 30+ years working in programming, operations, data center, and other technology roles culminating in a role as VP of Engineering, leading a global organization of hundreds of wonderful people building digital banking solutions for one of the world's largest providers of banking software and services. Jason is also one to have (way) too many hobbies. These including amateur radio, providing an outlet to pursue his love for electronics, and (of course) brewing beer. Home brewing gives him a chance to tinker with industrial controls as he continuously works on and expands his homemade 1/2BBL automated brewing setup.

So that's the background on us. With our son off to college and our daughter now grown and getting married, we decided it was time to do something focused on ourselves again. Rachael will pursue her research passion, and Jason will start focusing on brewery systems. We started 2025 ready to start building on that plan.

In February of 2025, it all took a turn. Strategy changes at Jason's employer led to a layoff. This meant he had the time to completely focus on brewery technology. We decided to take the chance and try to build a side hustle into Jason's full time gig. Initially launched as a software development shop, JCDigital set out to build a bespoke platform tailored specifically for the craft brewery industry. However, as we worked with local breweries in St. Louis and the surrounding area, we quickly found ourselves doing much more than just technology services. We recognized a critical gap in the industry: breweries were struggling under expensive, unplanned business interruptions, and at the worst time possible. Small issues were becoming big issues, and big issues were threatening brewery closure. A market down-turn wasn't necessarily causing breweries to fail, but that market down-turn was putting intense pressure on those breweries, and compounding issues without remediation plans were pushing those businesses over the edge and exhausing cash flow.

We are very active in our local brewery community. We knew that the craft brewing market was facing intense pressure, but taking the time to get closer to these operations was eye-opening. Of course, for a lot of breweries, every day is about survival in this market, but there are so few tools available to the brewery owner today. Systems are not meant to work together efficiently, the tools that did exist were dated and forced teams to adapt their operations to tools instead of the tool enabling the business. These teams built their business from the ground up, rolling up their sleeves and putting in the hard work needed to get going. As market challenges set in, every equipment failure, unplanned event, or loss of a critical resource just compounded the omni-present business challenges. We found ourselves getting involved in nearly every aspect of the brewery business, not only pulling on decades of engineering experience but any other skill we could bring to the table to help them get past the challenges and put things back on track. That's what makes this community awesome, and we love being a part of it.

You've seen these types of issues before. The loss of a chiller results in weeks of down-time waiting on installation of a replacement. The replacement doesn't work adequately due to configuraiton issues and air trapped in the glycol system. The isolation valves, sitting stationary for years, start leaking when filling and purging the system, causing siphoning of the glycol solution from the uni-tank jackets, overflowing the fill neck on the chiller and dumping expensive glycol on the brewery floor. Contractors recommended by equipment manufacturers perform the installation but don't support the other system components so they leave the system in a non-functional state. Systems built by owners and brewers, which worked well enough for years, suddenly face expensive re-work proposals from contractors just to restore operations. These are all problems we've helped with...sometimes a brewery simply needs the system to be repaired and returned to service as cost-effectively as possible. You shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

As we talked with other breweries, we recognized that these events were not only too common, but also frequently avoidable. Those incidents that were not avoidable could be planned for. In many cases, the leadership team was focused on production and market, but either didn't have the time or the experience in vendor selection, vendor management, project management, business continuity, and the other important aspects ensuring a resilient business. These are the very same skills Jason leveraged as a Fortune 500 executive, and they are the same offerings we have expanded JCDigital to bring to craft breweries today. We are invested in the future of this industry, and we will learn your operation and help you make technology work for your specific business.

Our software platform, Nominal Brewing Management, is still at the core of what we do. We understand that simply replacing your brewery management software may not be your top initiative. If it is, we will definitely be glad to help! However, we believe the real value is in a partner that can understand your business, help you build a technology strategy that integrates your operations, and delivers complete service solutions that can leverage Nominal for future growth and operational excellence.