We recently sat down with Alicia Rogers, bar manager at Jeremiah’s Tavern, to hear how she creates her specialty cocktail menu.
Here are 4 takeaways from her process:
Keep your clientele front of mind when designing your menu.
There are 4 Jeremiah's locations and they all serve a different clientele. The one Alicia runs is pretty suburban, so she designs cocktails that people with children would want to drink.
Other locations are more urban or cater to college kids, so those are different. So while she serves Elderflower Fizzes, other locations push Fireball or Jägerbombs. And it works.
Get the creative juices flowing by checking out Pinterest, cocktail books, etc.
You can of course use the recipes you find as-is, but you can also put a twist on them with things that bring you a little joy.
For example, Alicia’s gotten really into making fresh purees, simple syrups, and growing herbs at the bar. These things make their way into a lot of the drinks Alicia puts on her menus.
Pull out all the stops to move the stuff you’ve got to move.
When one season ends and another begins, it seems like there's always leftover inventory. So do everything you can to move it in the current season:
- include it in several specialty cocktails that can appeal to different folks (e.g. as part of a normal cocktail and as part of a slushie)
- prioritize & highlight it on the menu
- discount it
- offer it up as part of a shot and beer combo
A lot of times folks do one or two of these things. Doing all of them will really get that item moving.
Organize your menu by spirit.
This one's pretty obvious, but it's worth repeating. Customers generally have a baseline affinity for one base spirit, or at the very least a have a preference on clear vs brown. Make it easy for them to choose their beverage by organizing your menu according to spirit.
Bonus: This also helps with menu creation, since if you know you need to have a defined number of cocktails from each spirit—e.g. 1 rum cocktail, 2 vodka cocktails, 2 whiskey cocktails, etc.—creating a full menu becomes less daunting.
Check out the interview clip for more on how Alicia creates her cocktail menu: