The Best Brewery Guides and Tips

Earlier this year, we wondered if hard seltzer had lost some of its fizz. Turns out the bubble hasn’t popped yet. But the extreme growth of the category for the past three years has finally slowed down.

According to Drizly, for the first time in recent years, hard seltzer showed a seventeen percent year-over-year decrease during the 2022 Labor Day weekend. And during the summer, one of the busiest times of the year for pushing hard seltzer, Drizly reported sales dropping below last year’s Fourth of July numbers.

But despite the holiday slowdowns, the national eCommerce beverage platform did show that hard seltzer sales still have a 3.8 percent share in 2022, up from a 3.3 percent share of all sales in 2021.

While folks are still thirsty for hard seltzer, it has quickly become apparent that brands need to stand out on the shelf.

But how?

We spoke to several breweries, who have started their own craft hard seltzer brands over the past few years, to hear what has worked well for them, tips they have to share, and why you might not want to start a hard seltzer brand in today’s market.

For the past few years, online ordering and delivery have become our new norm. Well, to be fair, consumers ordered food to their doorstep even before nationwide lockdowns started in early 2020, but the global pandemic greatly accelerated the trend. According to an article by McKinsey & Company, the global food delivery market is worth more than $150 billion, more than doubling during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the four major markets where food delivery reigns supreme—Canada, Australia, the U.S, and the U.K.—the market has grown four to seven times larger than in 2018.

Since pandemic-related lockdowns started in March 2020, the growing food-delivery business has spiked to new heights in the most mature markets.

Graph courtesy of McKinsey & Company

At first, this was a contemporary shift for more traditional restaurants and eateries used to giving customer service in person. But by now, no-contact delivery has become the standard way to get food from your establishment to your customers’ homes.

Especially for those customers who are still cautious about venturing out to eat indoors or even those who just don’t want to get off the couch on a Saturday afternoon, they expect their food delivery to now come with the utmost care and safety in mind.

With that mind, it’s always good to review the ways you can maximize your contactless system, if you offer one. Or take a look at the best ways to set up no-contact delivery if it’s new to you.

Whether you’ve already implemented no-contact or contactless delivery or are finally considering it for the first time, here’s a guide on everything you need to know.

As consumers, Thanksgiving usually means two extra days off of work to spend time with family and friends celebrating an American holiday. For brewery, bar, and restaurant owners, however, the prospect of a federal holiday like Thanksgiving poses an interesting question: Should you stay open?

Traditionally, Thanksgiving and the subsequent day dubbed Black Friday have been the days when Americans spend…and spend big.

According to the National Retail Federation (NRF), the world’s largest retail trade association, during the 2021 holiday season, Black Friday brought in a whopping 66.5 million people shopping at stores with the average adult spending $430 dollars (Deloitte).

And while these have traditionally meant big and small retailers, Goose Island is probably the brewery most well known for getting beer businesses in on the Black Friday action. Since 2010, the brewery has released its incredibly popular barrel-aged Bourbon County Brand Stout and its yearly variants the morning of Black Friday. It’s a special event that has become a bit of tradition with folks lining up around the block to get their hands on a limited number of that year’s bottles.

And other breweries have since followed suit with everyone from Weldworks to Lakefront Brewery to 3 Sons getting in on the action.

But increasingly on a wider scale, more retailers have actually closed their doors on Turkey Day and subsequent Black Friday. In 2020, major chains such as Walmart, Best Buy, and Dick’s Sporting Goods closed on Thanksgiving for the first time and continued that trend in 2021. Similarly, last year, Target took things a step further, announcing that it will close all of its stores on Thanksgiving every year for the foreseeable future.

It’s a bit of a quandary: stay open and potentially tap into one of the largest sales days in America, or close and give yourself and your staff time off to spend with their families?

Keeping a restaurant or similar establishment open during a federal holiday means understanding a few considerations. For example, recognizing that overtime requirements can mean you might need to pay your employees more than the average weekday. Consequently, staying open might only be profitable if you can ensure that you’ll experience increased traffic that day.

Overall, what are the advantages of keeping your bar, brewery, or restaurant open on Thanksgiving and/or Black Friday? Alternatively, what are the potential benefits of choosing to give your staff the day off? And if you do decide to light up that open sign, how can you prepare?

We weighed both sides of the equation and offered a few tips and tricks on how to navigate that question during this holiday season.

Forbes called it.

While researching food industry trends for 2022, they forecasted that the pandemic would drive a revolution in digital and delivery services by changing how people purchased and received food like curbside pickup, online ordering, and delivery.

Now, it’s a sentiment shared across the industry. Boston Consulting Group reported in the article “The $100 Billion Digital Lifeline for Restaurants” that “Delivery’s market share jumped from 7% in 2019 to about 20% in 2020. Across the industry, digital ordering now represents 28% of all orders compared with 10% before the pandemic, with most brands showing increases.”

As customers continue to order their food online, it’s time for breweries, bars, and restaurants to consider food delivery services (if you haven’t already). Should you develop your own delivery system for your restaurant or lean into a third-party alternative?

We’re breaking down the advantages, disadvantages, and potential revenue streams that a food delivery app can provide to help you consider all your options.

As restaurant owners, we want to make sure that our customers have an enjoyable experience—this starts the moment they walk in the door to make a reservation. It’s our goal to get them seated and enjoying their meal as soon as possible.

Long Range Systems, one of the industry’s top providers of technology that improves the guest experience, was so curious about the amount of time hungry patrons spend waiting in line that they conducted a survey with 267 restaurant owners and managers.

The results indicated that nearly ninety-three percent of restaurants have at least some wait-time periods.

On average, the study found that people waited almost a half hour for a table, with restaurants recording waitlists of an average of 6.6 hours per week.

With those numbers in mind, and as businesses continue to lean into the digital age, a smart investment for restaurants could be leveraging a waitlist or wait-in-line app. These platforms can help you manage bookings, text patrons when their table becomes available, and, overall, make the experience of waiting for a table more convenient for your customers.

Here are our best recommendations for wait-in-line apps for restaurants that help you smoothly run your business while also creating an enjoyable experience for your customers.

Here is a staggering fact: Over 726,936 bartenders currently work in the United States, according to demographic information from Zippia.

And that number is only going to get higher. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics, the employment of bartenders is projected to grow eighteen percent from 2021 to 2031, with about 105,300 openings for bartenders projected each year, on average, over the next decade.

Many of those positions are anticipated based on the need to replace workers who change careers or retire.

If your business is looking to hire a bartender who has the proper bartending licenses and skills, keep reading as we break down salaries and tipping expectations for bartenders.

With over 9 million registered users, Untappd can easily tap into the trends and insights of drinkers in your city, state, region, and beyond.

Untappd’s Analytics discovers beers Untappd drinkers are consuming the most in your area along with what styles are trending and which are taking a turn downwards. And so much more.

Tap into all the data of the world’s largest craft beer social networking platform to help you make business decisions about what beers to make, which to put on tap, or even which to stock on the shelf.

Get a sneak peek into what Untappd’s Analytics can show you as we take a look at the checked-in beers in San Diego, CA, over the last ninety days.

And if San Diego isn’t your city, we also have guides available for the following cities:

• London, England
• Chicago, IL
• Asheville, NC
• Portland, OR

Last week, we put together a comprehensive guide to American grain varieties. But with barley and other grains being harvested all across the world, this week we’re focusing on European malts.

In fact, according to Statista, the European Union produced the most amount of barley in the world in 2021/2022 at almost 53 million metric tons. And the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) predicts that by the end of next year world barley production will hit 147.72 million metric tons, meaning that continental Europe will be set to produce a little over a third of the world’s barley.

Barley is a huge component of any beer recipe. But its characteristics can vary based on where it’s grown, the climate, genetics, and even breeding practices.

For that reason, it’s important for any brewer to understand the differences between North American and European grains.

And with so many varieties on the market, we’re putting together a comprehensive guide to showcase the different types of European malts available to you and a few examples of each from reputable European maltsters such as Weyermann, Simpsons, BestMalz, and Castle Malting. Make sure that as a brewer or brewery owner you’re armed with the best possible knowledge to make a decision around the type of grain to use for your beers.

Editor’s Note: This will be part two of a two-part series covering grains across the world. For this piece, we’ll cover grains native to Europe. You can find our piece on North American grain varieties here.

On average, diners only look at a menu for 109 seconds, according to a Gallup poll cited in a Canva article on menu design hacks. Let that sink in. That’s about as long as it takes to pump a full tank of gas.

Since time is of the essence, it’s important that you thoughtfully consider the layout, standard menu size, dish titles, etc. After all, your menu is your biggest and most important sales pitch.

It’s a persuasive and useful tool that, if designed and built appropriately, will increase sales and keep your restaurant fully booked each day.

Let’s examine the foundations of restaurant menu design and how you can leverage a seemingly simple list of dishes and beers to boost your bottom line.