Mark Daniels: Why I love my Brulines...

My first car was an Austin Rover Mini Metro, and I loved it. Despite the beating that the spotty, seventeen-year-old me gave it, that car just kept plodding on.

That car just kept going and going until I eventually traded it in for a Ford Capri. Everybody remembers their first cars and their first loves with rose-tinted fondness, but the one thing that I always remember about my Metro was the fuel gauge. It was rubbish.

Honestly, you might as well have just drawn a dial on to some cardboard and stuck it over the display; it would have been far more accurate and I was reminded of that petrol gauge earlier this year when my brewery popped up and said they wanted to install Brulines in my premises.

Like many tied licensees, I was immediately wary of having a monitoring solution fitted on my lines and, full of all the information I had gathered from the media, I didn't want a system in that was woefully inaccurate, that meant that I was constantly being spied on and that, as we were being led to believe, would have me convicted of breaking my contract and evicted from my home before it had even been switched on.

Brulines, I felt, eroded the trust that existed between myself and my business partners and, despite the fact that I've never purchased beer for sale in my pub outside of my contract, I immediately felt guilty at the prospect of being watched.

So when it was installed I set out to prove the Brulines detractors right. I was determined to make sure that any inaccuracy within the system was highlighted and I would become a pain in the arse to my BDM in order to achieve this.

Greene King fitted the i-draught version of Brulines, meaning that I get an almost-instant display of what has been sold through which font. Beer, line-cleaning fluid and water are all reported, by hour, on a slightly basic but relatively easy-to-understand screen and summary screens report on total volume, temperature and whether it's been too long since the line was cleaned. There's even a display that shows how much beer was delivered on which date.

i-draught also allows me to marry the figures Brulines provide to the figures my till provides. It's not a time consuming job if you get in to the habit of doing it regularly, but it is a bit of a pain. However, it's a vital task if you're going to show that the system doesn't work, and so I set about diligently inputting the numbers from my ePos system and comparing the figures Brulines produced.

Almost immediately I could see errors. I was on the phone quicker than Gillian McKeith can feint in a bushtucker trial, complaining to Brulines support that their system was inaccurate. They figured it was a calibration error and sent an engineer down to recalibrate and we started the process again. This became a cycle for a few weeks: they'd have a look at my equipment, I'd input some numbers and complain that the difference meant their system was wrong.

The difference between my numbers and the i-draught numbers was often marginal: a pint here, a pint there; but ultimately it added up to big differences by the end of the week.

Eventually, exasperated that we were getting nowhere with tallying up the data, I decided to spend a couple of days by myself on the bar, keeping a manual record of pints sold too. I chose the early part of the week so that it was quieter, and kept a meticulous bar chart alongside the reports of the till. My wife thought I was being a bit anal, but I'd got a bee in my bonnet and wanted to get a Publican blog written up to demonstrate the erroneous ways of monitoring equipment.

The trouble was this: at the end of day one, my bar chart, my till and my Brulines report all matched. How odd.

At the end of day two, the same thing happened. On day three, I cleaned the lines (keeping a record of my water and line cleaning fluid) and there was a margin of error so small between the three reports it was almost not worth bothering about.

On day four, a Thursday, I put a member of staff on in the evening and at the end of the night there was a discrepancy between the till and Brulines...

Over the course of that weekend, I spotted discrepancies between the till reports and the Brulines report and it gradually dawned on me that the errors weren't coming from the Brulines equipment.

In a rush on a busy Friday night staff will add the price of the round up in their head and enter the number manually, rather than pushing the different buttons that correspond to the product sold. Immediately the till and Brulines showed errors. Locking down the till so that staff had to use the pre-programmed functions annoyed them, but meant that the product sold matched more closely; then I was able to spot over-pouring happening. Or pints not being registered to tabs on the till in a rush when serving the Sunday lunch.

Internal errors that were my responsibility, and that I might not have spotted if I hadn't been so desperate to prove the equipment in my premises wrong.

Today, six months later, I monitor my Brulines equipment daily. There have been hiccups along the way (the device on my Carlsberg line broke down and failed to report for a week before it was replaced) and the two-stage pour of Guinness can cause the system to report a pint and a bit poured when only a pint has been dispensed. Sometimes, in line-cleaning, the system can fail to correctly identify the transition from product to line-cleaning fluid. But these are marginal, and often self-explanatory.

This isn't an effort to destabilise the argument against Brulines, simply the fact that I have actually found the system to work - and, more importantly, to be useful.

If pub companies wish to use such a system, then landlords should have access to something like i-draught, in which they can compare their own data immediately. But if you have got such a system you should be using it as well, not just to aid any argument you might have with your landlord, but to be sure yourself that the product is being dispensed correctly. For peace of mind.

And we should always remember that, like the petrol display in a car, the information obtained from such equipment is just a guide to what is happening. It's not necessarily gospel.

After all, the other day my wife drove our current car for twenty miles with the petrol computer displaying a range of zero miles left in the tank...