THC bevs will be illegal

We got this info from Shaun McGuire, a 20-year industry vet who's also recently begun career coaching for bartenders.

From Shaun's time in the industry and his time coaching, he's realized that almost all the problems bartenders face fall into 5 categories:

1. Personal life and work balance. This can look like a lot of things: getting work stuff asked of you during non-work hours; relationship problems with friends or your partner; feeling like you don't have any free time.

2. Money—future financial planning. Virtually no bartenders have employer-sponsored retirement accounts, so all their saving is up to them. How to do it, where to start, how to cap spending—bartenders often have trouble with all these things.

3. Bad work environment. Could be a bad boss, bad co-workers, or even abusive customers.

4. Alcoholism/substance abuse. This is a big one, especially given how much access we have to alcohol in our industry and how easy it is to have a drink, either professionally or socially.

5. Money—the amount you make. Given the data he's collected he doesn't think there are a lot of bartenders out there that aren't making enough money. But what he knows from experience (and I know from my own bartending experience) is that it can feel sort of magical how quickly money disappears. In other words, it's almost always the outflow that's the problem, not the inflow.

Shaun also cautioned that it's super common for folks to feel more than one of these at once, and not uncommon for them to feel all of them at once.

So, what to do? If you're unhappy as a bartender—or if you're a manager/owner and you suspect one of your employees is unhappy—use this list to see if you can trace your/your employees unhappiness back to one of these core problems. Once you know what the problem is, you can begin to address it.

And if you'd like Shaun's help doing so, reply to this email and I can get you in touch with him.

Check out the interview clip for more from Shaun about how these problems manifest, his coaching approach, and also how they fit into the bartender career progression he's started thinking about (honeymoon phase ➡️ adolescent phase ➡️ mature phase):

Why worry about menu design?

Imagine this: you've done the significant work to have an always-up-to-date beer menu. Every single time a keg kicks or a new can arrives you update the menu accordingly. And that happens multiple times a month/week.

But you're not seeing an uptick in beer sales. Why? The up-to-date menu should be helping. You're starting to wonder if maybe it's not worth maintaining the menu.

If this is the case, your issue might be with the design of your menu rather than the content. A poorly designed beer menu can flatline your beer sales. But a well-designed menu can:

• Make your customers want to spend time with your menu.
• Help customers figure out what to order more easily.
• This puts customers at ease: coming back to the menu to order another beer isn't a daunting task. It's a pleasant one.

How can I get a well-designed beer menu?

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

• Locate a graphic designer, ideally one who has experience with menu-making.
• Work with them to create a well-designed editable menu template. Make sure they understand the use case—you'll be editing this often, so it can't be a fragile design that breaks if a beer name is too long, etc. It also needs to be editable in an approachable software program, not a difficult-to-use design program.
• Train all necessary members of your team (managers, bartenders, etc.) on how to edit the menu template file. Make sure they practice so they know where to locate it, how to edit it, etc. You don't want them to be handcuffed on a Friday afternoon.
• Anytime your beer selection changes, you/a team member visits the file to delete the beer(s) that's gone and add the new beer(s).

It certainly takes some effort to track down a talented graphic designer and to train your team, but doing it manually like this could be worth it if that's your only option.

• Shutdown-ending bill set to crush THC bevs. The bill removes an exception from 2018 legislation that allowed hemp-derived cannabis products to be legal. A few senators tried to remove the provision on Monday night, but that effort failed. There's still time for a save though: there's a one year grace period before the ban takes effect. Let the lobbying begin.
• World's 50 best bars list. Released every year, the list is mostly made up of very fancy-looking cocktail bars, places you might visit if you were on a certain kind of vacation and had some nice clothes with you.
• Barrel aged stouts grow up. SevenFifty Daily wrote a great article about how the tide is turning from sweet and sticky to nuance and complexity.