Seasonal and Holiday Guides for Restaurants, Breweries, and More!

As the holiday season approaches, Thanksgiving presents a unique opportunity for bars, restaurants, and hospitality venues to enhance customer experiences with festive offerings. One area often overlooked is the cocktail menu, yet well-crafted Thanksgiving cocktails can significantly boost sales and keep patrons coming back. A thoughtfully curated holiday drink selection not only sets the mood but also aligns with seasonal ingredients and customer expectations.

In this guide, we’ll explore five of the most festive Thanksgiving cocktails you can offer to elevate your drink menu. These recipes appeal to a broad range of palates while leveraging seasonal and cost-effective ingredients. By integrating these Thanksgiving cocktails into your offerings, you can enhance the guest experience and drive revenue during one of the busiest times of the year.

The winter season offers a unique opportunity for bars, restaurants, and hospitality establishments to refresh their cocktail menus and align with the season’s flavors and trends. Customers seek warmth, comfort, and indulgence as temperatures drop, making winter cocktails an essential part of your beverage offerings.

For bar owners and hospitality managers, crafting the perfect winter cocktail menu isn’t just about seasonal flavors—it’s a strategic opportunity to increase revenue, boost customer loyalty, and stand out in a competitive market. This guide will walk you through the critical steps of developing a winter cocktail menu that appeals to your clientele and maximizes profitability.

As the Halloween season approaches, bars and restaurants have a prime opportunity to capitalize on the festive atmosphere. Halloween is no longer just a day for costumes and candy—it’s become a season filled with themed parties and events, making it essential for businesses in the hospitality industry to craft unique experiences for their patrons. One of the most effective ways to embrace the spooky spirit is by offering themed drinks. Incorporating Halloween cocktails into your menu can attract more customers, boost sales, and create memorable experiences that keep guests coming back.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through five scary good Halloween cocktails that are visually impressive and delicious. These drinks are easy to implement into your bar’s offerings, and you can tailor each to fit various audiences, from casual guests to cocktail connoisseurs.

As a bar owner or hospitality manager, seasonal transitions present valuable opportunities to refresh your offerings and draw customers through creative, relevant, and on-trend menus. As fall approaches, it’s the perfect time to consider updating your cocktail menu to reflect the tastes and trends of the season. Fall cocktails surpass the standard pumpkin spice cliché—they showcase rich, bold flavors using seasonal ingredients like apples, cinnamon, and warm spirits.

A well-crafted fall cocktail menu can elevate your establishment’s reputation, appeal to a broader audience, and boost profitability. This guide will walk you through the key steps to designing a successful fall cocktail menu. From ingredient selection to marketing strategies, you’ll learn how to create a menu that captures the spirit of autumn while meeting the needs of your customers and business.

For restaurants, bars, and small businesses, the 4th of July presents a lucrative opportunity to attract customers with festive offerings. One effective strategy is to feature specialty 4th of July cocktails. These themed drinks can enhance your holiday menu, attract patrons, and increase sales. In this guide, we’ll explore a range of 4th of July cocktails that can help you create a memorable Independence Day experience for your customers. From classic cocktails to innovative libations, each drink will capture the spirit of the holiday and, hopefully, additional sales for you.

Beyond its role as a morning staple, coffee has emerged as a versatile ingredient in the world of mixology, offering many opportunities for restaurants and small businesses to elevate their beverage offerings. Incorporating coffee into cocktails uniquely intrigues customers, infusing familiar flavors with a new twist. In this article, we will explore coffee cocktails, providing insights and recipes tailored for establishments seeking to diversify their menu offerings and captivate their clientele.

UPDATED: 2/22/24

Bar games conjure a variety of mental images. Visions of darts and billiards evoke the dive bar aesthetic, reminding us of a time the beer-and-skeeball combo was exclusive to reluctant parents at Chuck E. Cheese. But as Bob Dylan once said, “these times, they are a’changing!” And in 2024, offering the right game at your bar and brewery can have a huge impact on cultivating clientele.

The concept of bar and brewery games dates back to the 6th and 5th centuries B.C. when Ancient Greeks could be found playing Kottabos, a game that involved flinging wine sediment at targets in exchange for prizes.

Today, more than ever, people are looking for that ‘x’ factor when it comes to visiting a brewery, bar, or taproom. It’s no longer enough to just make or serve great beer, unfortunately. Don’t get us wrong. That certainly helps. But when people go out to spend their hard-earned money, they’re looking for more from the hospitality industry.

“I think that taprooms are going to have to innovate more than ever as consumers migrate back from taprooms to traditional bars,” predicts West Sixth Brewing Co-Founder Brady Barlow. “Events are key. Increased community engagement is key. Food helps, for sure.”

Games continue to attract patrons and keep them coming back for more. And while the concept of pairing games and alcohol is ancient, bar and brewery owners are concocting new ideas for what the pairing can look like in modern taprooms.

Keeping games on hand gives guests a reason to stay longer (and thus spend more) while elevating the customer experience, making your taproom a destination. Having theme nights and group games as a recurring event increases engagement, and can be used to create a regular crowd on what would otherwise be a slower night.

Depending on your free space, clientele, and overall vibe, your choice of games may change. One thing is sure: introducing games adds something unique for patrons to enjoy and creates a deeper sense of community as guests interact in ways that get them talking, laughing, and connecting not just to one another but to your establishment and brand.

While most bars and breweries provide games free of charge, others choose a paid system with a per-game or day-pass fee. These fees are nominal (between $1.50-$5.00) but can add up and require minimal investment. Others, like Cleveland, Ohio’s Tabletop Board Game Cafe, off year-long memberships for around $25, giving patrons a reason to return on a regular basis.

If you’re looking to make your bar, brewery, or taproom a bit more fun and up your food and beverage sales, try bringing some of these games on board.

Those batches of beer, like your brewers, are continuously in motion.

As the holidays approach and your staff continues to work hard to bottle and distribute those final batches of seasonal beers, it’s a good opportunity to thank them for making it all possible.

As the brewing season of 2023 approaches, help keep your brewers comfortable (and caffeinated) with some practical, brewer-friendly gifts.

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.