Back to normal programming

Hi all, hope you're well.

I've been out due to some health issues the last couple months, but I'm happy to say we're back to normally scheduled programming starting this week! Starting today, you can once again expect Brave New Bar in your inboxes each and every Thursday.

On that note, we're looking for folks to interview and feature in upcoming editions. We're specifically interested in anyone who's had success or interesting experiences in the following areas and wants to share with our audience of >12,000 bar, restaurant, and brewery folks:

• Marketing—social media, influencers, traditional channels, etc.
• Tracking and taking advantage of the latest trends—in beverages, food, and more
• Pricing strategy—inflation has slowed but is still happening. What's your strategy now vs. a year ago?
• Staffing—training, recruiting/hiring, discipline
• Cultivating regulars—finding new ones, keeping existing regulars happy, etc.

👉 If you can speak to any of these topics please just reply and we can set up a time to chat!

Given how visually driven social media is, it's essential to have good photos that catch customers'—and prospective customers'—eyes. But taking good photos is hard, especially if you don't have any training. Where should you take the photos? When? How many? How often?

Enter Rob Austin, who has a background in photography and videography and now runs marketing for Leader Bar in Chicago. We picked Rob's brain for easy tips (that anyone can do) on how to take great social media photos, and he gave us nine great ones:

1. Take photos on a sunny day and use indirect natural light. For Rob, the ideal bar photo is this: in indirect light, take a photo of the food/beer/whatever with the bar in the background, drenched in that natural light.
2. If you have a good photo-taking place or two in your bar, stick with it. Don't force variety for photo location—the important thing is that you take good photos, not that you're taking them in different places around the bar.
3. Schedule a photoshoot. When Rob sees a good weather day (clear and sunny) coming, he'll coordinate with the chef to just go to town and rack up photos of everything he needs. This way, the next time he wants/needs to post he doesn't have to scramble to take a photo on a crappy weather day. He's already got the photo(s) he needs.
4. Depth of field part 1: Show the subject of the photo up front. The bar should be in the background, but not crystal clear—you want a photo where you can tell there’s a bar in the background and see there’s a TV, but not be able to read the tap handles or see who's playing the baseball game that's on the TV. That stuff is distracting.
5. Depth of field part 2: adjust if necessary. if you’re shooting a plate of food, tilt the back of the plate up by setting it on something that's like an inch tall. Much higher than that and it looks weird, and lower than that and you can't really get an idea of how delicious the thing on the plate is.
6. Don't take just 1 or 2 photos of the thing you need. Take a minimum of 30, with slightly different perspectives and angles. Cover your bases here to make sure you get a great photo—it's not like you're going to run out of room for your photos.
7. Put all your photos into a Google Drive folder. If they're in the cloud, you can always access them if you're in a hurry, if your phone dies or gets lost, etc. It also means others can access them, so you don't have to post if you're on vacation.
8. You can reuse a photo, but only if its been a little while. We're talking a few months.
9. Need inspiration? Follow the examples of other social media profiles that you think do a good job. There's a brewery near Rob—Old Irving Brewery—that he looks to for inspiration. Surely there's someone near you who's doing a good job. What do you like about their photos? ID that and then try to capture it in your next photoshoot.

For more from Rob about taking great social media photos, check out the interview clip:

And for more service industry marketing advice from Rob, check out this playlist of all Rob's videos on our Youtube channel.

❓ Why should I do it?

Imagine this world: your customers order their beers as soon as the server/bartender arrives. No samples, no back-and-forth. Customers just order.

That’s the world you can have if your Print Menus include full beer info. It equips customers with all the info they need to make a decision, leading to much faster order times.

Time savings is always helpful in general, but speeding up order times helps in some key ways:

• Incrementally increase sales (more customers have more time for a 2nd round)
• Turn over tables more quickly
• Make life easier for staff

❓ How can I do it?

You could do this manually. Google the beers you serve, copy what you need, and drop it into your menu document.

• Michelob Ultra overtakes Modelo Especial for top-selling beer in US. Modelo ascended following Bud Light's Dylan Mulvaney slump. But now Michelob Ultra, another AB product, has evidently risen to the top. Interesting to think about the broader trends that could be contributing—beer's overall drop in the alcohol sector, Hispanic folks being out less because of ICE fears, etc.
• CA wine growers struggle. Some CA wine growers are leaving acres of grapes to die on the vine because they don't have buyers. Why? According to Natalie Collins, President of the California Association of Winegrape Growers, there are a number of reasons, the biggest being a decrease in consumption by Gen Z, an oversupply of grapes, and an increase in cheaper imports.
• Profiling the king of natural wine in LA. Speaking of CA wine, the LA Times published a fun story about Scott Sampler, whose oddball natural wines have become fixtures at the city's top restaurants.