4 tips for creating your cocktail menu

This week we’re talking cocktail creation and cocktail menus with Alicia Rogers, bar manager at Jeremiah’s Tavern in the Rochester, NY area. Alicia's been in the industry for years, and at this point has her cocktail program down to a science.

Here are some takeaways from the interview:

Keep your clientele front of mind when designing your menu. The bar Alicia runs leans suburban, so she designs cocktails that people with children would want to drink. I.e. she’s not pushing Fireball or Jägerbombs. She's serving Elderflower Fizzes.

Get the creative juices flowing by checking out Pinterest, cocktail books, etc. You can def use recipes as-is, but you can also put a twist on them with things you’re interested in. For example, Alicia’s gotten really into making fresh purees and simple syrups, and they make their way into a lot of the drinks on her menu.

Pull out all the stops to move the stuff you’ve got to move. There’s always inventory you didn’t get through in the previous season. Do everything you can to move it in the current season: include it in several specialty cocktails that can appeal to different folks, prioritize & highlight it on the menu, discount it, offer it up as a shot and beer combo, etc. Don't do one of these things and expect to sell it quickly. Do them all if you can.

Organize your menu by spirit. 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 order by organizing your menu by spirit.

Check out the interview clip for more on how Alicia creates her cocktail menu:

Why?

For a beer drinker there isn’t much worse than getting excited about a beer you’re going to order, ordering it, then being told it’s no longer available.

You’re disappointed, and instead of straight-up joy, you’re starting the night off with a bad experience.

(The experience isn’t much better for the bartender—I know from experience.)

Depending on how out-of-date your menu is and how many folks come in, you could be providing dozens of folks a bad start to their visit.

You should avoid this experience, even if updating a menu is a pain in the ass (though it doesn’t have to be—more on that below).

How?

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

• Create an editable menu doc in Google Docs, Word, Powerpoint, or whatever
• Make sure everyone has access to the doc and knows how to update it
• Make updating the menu part of the opening checklist and/or shift change checklist

It certainly takes some time, but if you avoid just a few bad customer experiences, that time is well worth it.

• Free NAs for customers today. Today is "Ask for Athletic Day", so don't be surprised if more customers than usual order one. You don't need to do anything different—they'll just ask for a receipt b/c they need to upload it in order to get reimbursed (up to $7).
• A Snack for Gallo. Wine giant Gallo made a "strategic investment" in Montucky Cold Snack. Interesting to see this, since many larger corporations have been shedding beer brands if they can.
• Used beer yeast can remove lead from water. Some brainiacs at MIT found that through a process called biosorption, repurposed beer yeast can effectively grab lead out of water that's sent through it. They imagine the process could be used at home or at water treatment facilities.