The beer styles we should be drinking

For this week's interview we're taking a break from tactics to just share some personal stories from Alicia Rogers of Jeremiah’s Tavern.

She’s got plenty of experience and tips relating to cocktail menu-making, staff building, and all the things a successful bar manager needs to ace (check those out here), but in this week’s clip Alicia just talks about her service industry experience and background.

Stuff like this is fun to hear, since anyone with service industry experience can relate. For example:

• She got into the industry at 16 so she could buy a car. It was a 1993 Grand Am. Top-of-the-line stuff.
• She started as a host, of course. Since then she's worked every FOH job there is.
• At 19 she learned to bartend from her sister. They worked at the same place and whenever there was a slow time her sister would call her over for an impromptu workshop.

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Depending on how out-of-date your menu is and how many folks come in, you could be providing dozens of folks a bad start to their visit.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

This week industry news continued to focus on [possible] tariffs and the uncertainty they're bringing to a ton of businesses. It feels like folks are holding their breath to see what happens.

No new tariff threats have dropped since we covered the latest last week, but it should be an action packed next couple weeks, so we'll of course cover anything tariff-related as it comes to pass. Meanwhile, here are a couple fun articles:

• Beer drinkers should spend more time with these styles. VinePair quizzed 11 beer pros which styles they thought folks should drink more, and these are their answers. They're talking braggots, ESBs, etc. Not generally my favorites, but nice to hear about these folks' pet styles.
• MI brewery helps big, old, whiskered fish. Here in Wisconsin, the short lake sturgeon season on the Lake Winnebago system is statewide news. Seems it's as big a deal over in MI, where Saugatuck Brewing Co. partnered with the state's DNR to raise money for sturgeon habitat restoration. Right on.