The Best Brewery Guides and Tips

If you’re a restaurant or bar owner, your livelihood depends on customers year round.

Which is why, when it comes to federal holidays such as July Fourth or Labor Day, as a business owner you have an important decision to make: Stay open or close your doors for the day.

On the first Monday in September, restaurants and bars are often greeted by an influx of patrons ready to spend money on some well-deserved fun during a long weekend.

Staying open on that Monday could provide potential opportunities to boost your bottom line.

On the other hand, consider your employees. Should restaurant owners and staff also have the day off? Will that help with your team morale?

When it comes to Labor Day, a restaurant, bar, or brewery owner should weigh the pros to both staying open and closing for the day.

Luckily, we’ve started a list for you. And if you do choose to welcome guests, we’ve laid out a few ideas to set you apart from the pack.

When it comes to serving beer, glassware is important. Just like when a bartender makes an Old Fashioned or Margarita, they pour each respective drink into the right cocktail glass.

And while people in the industry debate the pros and cons of pint glasses, there is no denying that pint glasses are commonly used.

Plus, a pint is a ubiquitous industry measurement, meaning as a brewery, bar, or restaurant owner you should be familiar with this metric. But exactly how much is a pint? And why does the size differ depending on where you are?

Plus, what are the pros and cons of pint glasses? And what might be a good solution to the traditional pint glass?

We’ll break everything down in our guide to pints.

In the craft beer world, hops have become the equivalent of brewers’ gold. And if regular hops are like gold, then Cryo Hops® are like platinum, even more coveted.

Heavily hopped New England-style or hazy IPAs have exploded in popularity over the past few years. Just take a look at a roundup of yearly Untappd data in 2021. According to Untappd’s Top Ten Styles of 2021, “IPA – New England” ranked as the second-highest checked-in style on the app with over 6.1M check-ins.

Simultaneously American hop varieties such as Amarillo, Cascade, and Citra have been on the rise. But regardless of type, one thing remains the same—it’s the goodies inside the hop, called lupulin, that create these expressive hop flavors and aromas that we’ve all come to love.

Cryo Hops® separate that lupulin from a hop cone and pelletize it to create an enriched hop pellet that brews brighter, more expressive, juicier beers.

And they’ve become a new tool in a brewer’s arsenal. These days hop trends are constantly evolving, but keeping up on what consumers find hot (and cool) could be the key to creating your next big beer. Cryo Hops® just may be the coldest new hop evolution you should try.

As a restaurateur, it takes considerable and thoughtful effort to build not just an appetizing menu, but also one that’s profitable.

With the cost of ingredients continuing to rise, business owners are seeking out more creative and strategic approaches to market their menu to patrons in high volume. But how to lure them in?

Like the saying goes, “a picture is worth a thousand words.”

While it’s common for menus to exclude pictures of the food, Instagram is a perfect platform to show off all the tantalizing dishes you prepare.

Taking attractive photos of food and posting them on social media is a low-cost, effective way to drive more traffic to your business—while also demonstrating your restaurant’s culinary skills and style.

If you’re a restaurateur looking to utilize the tools of food photography and technique to engineer your menu on social media, you’ve arrived at the right place.

A bartender is essential to any drinking operation. Of course you need someone behind the bar slinging cocktails, stirring glasses, and pouring beers. But a role that is just as important in a bar is a barback. Someone who might not necessarily stand front and center in the eye of the customers, but rather scurries around washing glasses, refilling garnishes, stockpiling napkins, and pretty much doing all the other little tasks that make sure a bartender can perform their best.

Similar to bussers in restaurants, barbacks fill in behind the scenes, performing necessary duties that keep your establishment running smoothly everyday.

For that reason, barbacks are one of the most important pieces of a bar team.

If you’re becoming a new bar owner or looking to improve your current bar staff, hiring a knowledgeable, hard-working barback is key.

Certain cocktails benefit from a wide range of glasses that enhance both their appearance and taste. Picking the right drinkware boosts a beverage’s aroma and temperature. All this means that using the right cocktail glass is incredibly important.

But what type of glass does your bartender need for some of the most common cocktails on your bar’s menu?

Read on to learn about the most common types of cocktail glasses and how their design brings out different aspects of each beverage.

As consumers, we love federal holidays because it means an extra day for relaxing, hanging with friends, and drinking. For brewery, bar, and restaurant owners, however, the prospect of a federal holiday poses an interesting question: Should you stay open?

More often than not, for those who work in the hospitality industry, restaurants, bars, and brewery owners often decide to swing the doors open on traditional federal holidays to maximize a potential increase in traffic and sales.

But 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 a holiday? Alternatively, should you even stay open on these days. 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 offer a few tips and tricks on how to navigate those three- or four-day weekends.

Ambiance is one of the most important factors in creating a restaurant’s atmosphere. Whether you’re looking to open a fine dining restaurant or a casual cafe, it’s important you choose decor that matches your location, clientele, and menu offerings.

But choosing the right restaurant design and decor ideas can be overwhelming because there are so many options out there.

Accordingly, we’ve compiled a list of some of our favorite restaurant decorating ideas along with tips to help you create your ideal restaurant interior.

The average brewer gets into brewing because they love beer. And the act of brewing, of testing and failing, and testing again; of experimenting and creating.

What they don’t necessarily get excited over is paperwork. And yet, for the average brewer, the act of brewing is just one piece of running a very complicated business. One that often requires a lot of paperwork.

Enter software, technology that’s supposed to make brewery operations easier. But often the software available feels clunky, bloated, and difficult to use, because it’s either built for much larger breweries or designed for a different industry.

Next Glass’s suite of brewery solutions including Ollie and Oznr, lets you manage every aspect of your business activities from grain to glass. Unlike other technologies in the space, this trio of products was purpose-built for the brewing industry. Breweries can manage production, wholesale, and retail orders, as well as direct-to-consumer ecommerce all from one platform.

Ready to streamline your operations from brewing to logistics? Let’s get started.