Business Blog. A guide to craft beer promotion, sales, and education.

Every spring we like to take a look back at the previous year.

I'll be the first to admit, part of this process is self reflective/indulgent:

Were our collaboration beers this past year better than the year prior?

But, rest assured, we also ask—and answer—other questions.

Namely: how many people used BeerMenus in the last year? How many times? For what?

We want to make these stats available to the great businesses who use BeerMenus. By doing so, you'll be able to see and feel the effect of the BeerMenus community, and also understand the integral role you play in that community.

With that goal in mind, we put together the slides below.

A scaled down (5.1%) tropical pale ale brewed with opinions and aptness, Integrity is Rare is the perfect summer crusher. Follow it here to get notified when it arrives at a bar near you.

Some folks think beer is like a can of soup—you can leave it on the shelf until you're ready to drink it.

But the vast majority of beer is more like a loaf of bread—it tastes best fresh from the oven, but eventually gets stale and moldy. Local beer is on the up-and-up because it's got that “fresh-from-the-oven” taste, and drinkers love that quality. When a casual drinker has a supreme drinking experience trying a local beer, they'll immediately taste the difference—and never go back to their old macro standby.

We're not saying that you should immediately replace every brew on your tap list with a local one, but local beers are worth experimenting with because they have the opportunity to be fresher and thus better. Here's the science behind why it's worth it to serve local beers.

We recently sat down with Brittany Saxton, owner and GM at Bellefontaine, Ohio's Six Hundred Downtown. We talked about the local beer scene, how a world-class pizza place embraces craft beer, and how printed beer menus increased 600 Downtown's average bill size by $12.

_{Saxton at Six Hundred Downtown.}

We recently sat down with Travis Koester, owner of The Local Tap House of Nyack. We talked about life in the bar industry, his beer program, and his Digital Beer Board.

_{A screen grab of the Digital Beer Board BeerMenus Customer Success created, based on Koester's customization wishes.}

Travis Koester, owner of the Local Tap House of Nyack, has worked in the bar industry for 10 years.

So when it finally came time for him to open a bar of his own a couple years ago, he already had a vision for it.

Many of you are wondering if it’s time to go digital and replace your chalkboards with a digital beer board. You may have started seeing bars in your area using digital displays, and you'd like to know what it takes to make the switch to a digital beer board.

This article will outline

Offering an organized, easy-to-read print beer menu with beer descriptions is a great way to help your customers find beers they love and get them coming back to try new beers.

With BeerMenus you can create a print beer menu with just one click. It automatically organizes your beer menu by serving type and beer style and automatically fills in the beer descriptions, ABV, beer style, and location for each beer you have.

Our database of 120,000+ beers (hundreds of new beers added and updated each week) makes it easy to educate customers and staff with an up-to-date list of your current beer selection with beer descriptions, style, ABV, and location. Beer information comes straight from the breweries who manage and update their info when they release new beers so you don't have to spend time copying and pasting beer info from brewery websites.

Update: on March 24th, the Brewer's Association released the guidance necessary to calculate beer calorie content. As a result, (and as you can read in our latest blog post here), we've successfully built our Calorie Content Generator.

We've recently gotten a number of questions about what the FDA's new requirements on alcohol-related calorie and nutrient information mean for beer retailers. We dug into the FDA's extremely riveting (kidding, obviously) official sources and pulled out the most relevant information.

In short: if the rules apply to you, we've got you covered. We can now display the necessary calorie information, making sure your mainstay beers comply with the new rules. If you have any questions, drop us a line at 347-927-1574 or support@beermenus.com.

Last week the Brewer's Association unveiled their Calorie and Carbohydrate Calculator and Beer Nutrient Database. These are the basic tools chain restaurants can use to generate the calorie content they need on their menus starting May 5.

We gave the process a shot and found it's tedious at best and an annoyance at worst.

However, because the primary calculators have been released, not everyone will have to go through the tedious process: Our development team has filled in the final pieces of our Calorie Content Generator.

Schedule a consultation to learn more about our Calorie Content Generator.

It's a good time to be a beer lover. There are now more than 5,000 breweries in the United States alone—that's twice as many as there were just four years ago.

But there's another trend—a more subtle change—that's influencing the way restaurants, bars and taprooms sell beer. Brewers Association economist Bart Watson calls it “premiumization.”