Should taprooms allow kids?

What started as a menu necessity during Covid has sneakily become one of the best marketing channels available to bars and restaurants. That's right: I'm talking about QR Menus.

Here's how Rob Austin, a bar and restaurant marketing expert in Chicago, explains the marketing opportunity offered by a robust QR Code Menu system:

• The basics: customers need to see your menu to order. If your menu is QR-based, then you basically have a captive digital audience. Take advantage of that.
• Have your QR code point to a page on your website. This is the key—getting more people to your website, where you're in control of the experience. There are 2 related reasons this is so important.
• First, you'll increase your website traffic in a meaningful way. Each month thousands of people will visit your website—and thus interact with you digitally—who otherwise wouldn't.
• Second, you can show QR Menu visitors exactly what you want to show them. For Rob & Leader Bar, he of course provides the menu when someone scans the Leader Bar QR Code. But he shows them a bunch of stuff above the menu, stuff he wants them to see: upcoming events, the fact that they do online ordering, how to book a private party, the bar's story, introduce that they have brunch, show them their social media handles, etc. And changing what's there is as simple as updating your website.
• How else are you going to get this much content in front of such an ideal audience? It's more effective, cheaper, and just plain better than doing social media advertising, and certainly more time-effective than typical social media posts.
• And once you're ready, you can take this a step further too: install a newsletter signup, where folks can input their email addresses and you can send out a weekly/monthly newsletter straight to their inbox. Now you've turned the QR Menu into an outbound marketing channel.

Check out the interview clip for more from Rob on QR Code Menus:

And if you want to hear more great marketing advice from Rob, check out this playlist on the Brave New Bar Youtube channel.

Why?

Because TV Menus:

• Automatically update in seconds
• Always look professional
• Are easy for guests to read
• Help guests order faster
• Aren't as expensive or difficult to setup as you might think (more on that below)

Put simply, TV Menus can save you/your team time and make it easy for customers to order.

Of course, they aren't right for everyone—if you've got a quaint, cozy Belgian beer bar you don't want to jam a TV Menu above the bar.

But if you already have a few TVs, it might be worth trying, just to see if they resonate with your customers. In the right situation TV Menus can lead to a meaningful increase in beer sales.

How can I do it?

You could do this manually. How you'd implement it depends on what works for your team, but it could look like this:

• Get a smart TV (i.e. one w/ an internet browser).
• Design a slideshow on Google Slides to serve as your menu. Make sure you tune the settings to rotate screens correctly, etc.
• Use your smart TV's browser to access the Google Slides file.
• Make sure all members of the team know how to edit the file.
• Anytime your beer selection changes, visit the file to delete the beer that's gone and add new beers.

It certainly takes some time and training, but doing it manually like this could be worth it if that's your only option.

• Heineken starting to brew with a huge battery, cutting emissions. At this point it's only at a brewery in Portugal. The battery will provide round-the-clock renewable steam in such a way that no brewing process changes will be necessary. Cool stuff. Henieken's aiming for net zero emissions by 2040.
• Kids still welcome in many taprooms. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel spoke with some local breweries about their kid-friendly taprooms. The article is in response to a national trend of breweries barring parents from bringing their kids along to the taproom. Doing that seems completely completely insane to me, so I guess it's good I live here in Milwaukee with my two boys: I love them dearly, but it's precisely when I'm with them that I need a beer the most.
• 10 biggest brewery red flags. Vinepair surveyed brewery employees and came up with a list of the 10 biggest. Old furniture that looks like it's from a basement really resonated for me.