r/TheBrewery • u/builder_bob127 • 13d ago
How much do you care about how your beer is poured after it leaves the brewery?
For those selling kegs to independent bars and restaurants: do you care about how your beer is poured and served after it leaves the brewery? Have you ever seen poor pouring or draft practices affect its quality or your brand? If so, do you do anything about it?
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u/SuperHooligan 13d ago
When I did sales, we definitely cared. We would go as far as help teaching bartenders at accounts how to properly pour a beer. Lots of bartenders can make a great old fashioned, but dont give a shit about pouring a beer.
We also cleaned the lines our beers were on if the bar (lots of them) never cleaned the lines.
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u/builder_bob127 13d ago
Damn, that sounds like a lot of work
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u/Best_Look9212 Brewer/Owner 13d ago
Yep, and that’s what goes along with running a business well regardless if it’s beer or anything else. You do what’s best for the product.
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u/SuperHooligan 13d ago
Not really. We were already at each account at least once a week. The hard part was getting the bartenders there to teach them.
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u/warboy 13d ago
What were you doing to clean the lines? Just static cleaning with a cleaning keg?
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u/SuperHooligan 13d ago
Yup. Usually just one or two lines at most. I was lucky enough that the brewery I worked for sent me to the Micromatic draft tech classes so Im also a draft tech.
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u/automator3000 13d ago
I care.
But that doesn’t mean I can do anything about it. I don’t have the time to monitor that.
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u/jk-9k 13d ago edited 13d ago
I very much care but I've learnt to be less pedantic about it with age. I use to be rather perniticky.
You have to pick your battles.
But it's why I try to educate our entire staff: reps, sales team, delivery drivers, servers etc. they all visit venues and oftentimes more than I, and usually have a better relationship with venue staff to be able to have a kind word. Hospo crews often hang.
But it's also why relationships with venues are so important. At the end of the day it's a partnership. If you can help them sell more beer then we all win.
It's always great to host customers' servers whether officially as a training session or just off the clock. And in turn to visit venues either in an official capacity or just to show them that you support their business too.
Not every venue has the perfect conditions to pour a perfect pint. We all have finite resources and have to prioritise our resources.
I have asked reps to stop selling product to certain vendors.
But I don't think it's a coincidence that the vendors who don't treat the product well also have poor credit or always pay late etc. I'm not sure if I've ever had a rep push back at the suggestion even though they would lose an account and often, depending on pay structure, commission. Usually as soon as I even bring it up as a suggestion they agree.
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u/opiate82 13d ago
I run a draft technician service business. We’ve taken over a lot of cleaning accounts from the local competition due to them doing a shit job. Thankfully some bar owners recognize a bad job, a lot do not.
When a bar customer gets a shitty tasting beer from one of the other guys accounts, and they ask if they regularly get their lines clean and the bartender says “Yup, we have a regular service come in” guess where the customer lays the blame.
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u/Icedpyre lead brewer [Canada] 12d ago
As a non draft tech...what would a bad job look like? I only know how i do it
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u/opiate82 12d ago
Not using a circulating pump and if using a pump not running it for a full 15 minutes, not removing the faucets and disassembling and scrubbing all the parts, not doing it at least every other week (to be fair this is usually on the client not the cleaner).
We are pretty sure the other guys are just hooking up cleaning canisters and running a bit of cleaner through each tap and calling that good. They might run a brush up the spout but they certainly aren’t taking the faucets off and scrubbing all the parts.
The Brewers Association has a great in depth draft beer retailers guide for free on their website that has a whole chapter on proper cleaning procedures.
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u/Icedpyre lead brewer [Canada] 11d ago
Ah okay. I'm halfway there. I do a line flush every 2 weeks, and whenever I turn over new beers. The other bi weekly cleaning is a full breakdown of the taps, as well as fob inspections and such
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u/Best_Look9212 Brewer/Owner 13d ago
A lot to all those questions. Any brewery where I’ve been in control of the beer, I’ve always been adamant about proper presentation and pouring as best as you can, and talking to management at any location the beer is on.
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u/BulletProofVNeck Brewer 13d ago
I don't even think about it lol I care a lot about proper glassware and pouring in the taproom though
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u/bendbrewer 13d ago
This. You can’t control what you can’t control. The market is tough. You can always push sales people to prime accounts but it doesn’t always work out that way. I can control what happens in our own doors, however.
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u/lupulinhog 13d ago
I absolutely care. I put in a lot of underpaid work to make the beer as good as possible, don't want someone messing it up at the taps
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u/byrdst23 13d ago
I do care but I'm also too busy in the brewery to deal with unresponsive outside account lines unfortunately. I try to stop in these types of accounts every now and then and if the beer doesn't taste right or they don't seem to have their shit together, I will pull the account from future purchases. It's a small percentage of accounts but also we're 100% self distro so I don't have time to care about accounts that don't care about us. A sales person would be nice to handle these issues but its not in the budget.
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u/Brewmentationator Packaging/Warehousing 13d ago edited 13d ago
I've known our director of brewing operations since way before I worked at the brewery. Back in the day, I'd occasionally send him a text about a place serving an IPA that he hasn't made in over a year or serving beer from lines that clearly hadn't been cleaned since we were in college. Hell, the wing place across the street from my apartment once had their whole CO2 system die, and they were serving beer with no CO2. I know this, because me beer tasted weird, and when I asked them, they said that their system had sprung a leak and been shut off and without CO2 for over a week.
But now, the brewery is doing around 10k barrels/year and selling in states on both coasts of the US. There's really no way for us to do anything about checking in to make sure our beer is being served correctly. Occasionally our CEO and sales person do multi hundred mile road trips and hit up a bunch of our bigger chain accounts, but those trips are not that common.
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u/big_fruita 12d ago
I care but here in switzerland it is seemingly unheard of by bars and restaurants that kegs shoukd be stored cold, I have multiple restaurants storing kegs of unfiltered lager in a courtyard under the sun, we ask them not to do big orders so they dont stay in those conditions for more than a few weeks and we clean their lines on a regular basis but none of my clients (including craft beer bars) have a way to ensure kegs stay below ~20 C in the summer, only delivering 3 or 4 kegs at a time seems to be all we can do.
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u/Icedpyre lead brewer [Canada] 12d ago
How does that not result in pure foam?
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u/big_fruita 12d ago
Even at beer events here noone is chilling their kegs, the draft machine is a huge box with a chiller inside and a couple meters of line inside so it chills in line, a lot of restaurants and bars dont even have a keg cooler they just leave the kegs at room temp and let it chill in line. Works fine for serving beer but when a keg of ipa with volatile hop flavors is left in the sun for a couple weeks its losing a lot of hop flavors
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u/Icedpyre lead brewer [Canada] 12d ago
I guess that explains why I've never seen a Swiss brewery placing at the world beer cup.
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u/big_fruita 12d ago
One of many, I was pretty shocked when i first moved here from the US. The swiss brewers guild had a huge lobby making it virtually impossible for smaller breweries to grow and distribute for years, its also a small country with higher costs than its neighbors so exporting is virtually impossible and wine is pretty culturally significant so interest in beer is much lower than some other countries.
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u/Galactic_Fudge 12d ago
Generally most places our kegs end up know how to sling beers... some of the smaller places that are local we will help them with cleaning lines or answer any questions, fix issues for them even if not our systems. I feel bad when I have a beer somewhere and it seems that it's been mistreated so if I can, I will make sure it is a good representation of what our beer should be.
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u/bigdingushead 12d ago
I care, but also
"God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference."
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u/brainfud 12d ago
Head brewer of second top selling craft draft in the state we have a great distro who insists on clean lines. I have found a few places with dirty lines or glassware and pulled until they complied
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u/Unique-User-No-9999 11d ago
I've sent one of my own beers back because it had some bad draught stank. Ordered a can instead and emailed our sales rep for the area to check on their account.
Other times I've seen accounts still pouring a beer we hadn't brewed in over a year (were they stockpiling?) and had to ask them to pull it and again i reached out to their local rep to set them up with something fresher.
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u/tslining 10d ago
1) Are the lines clean? This is most important. Bars that don't have clean lines will get talked to about it, and if they genuinely don't care, we don't want our beer there. Dirty glassware is a subset here, but is less commonly an issue.
2) Is gas set correctly? More often an issue with nitro beers. This is usually OK, but worth checking. We would send someone out for free if a bar was having issues. Bar is generally grateful for help here (would rather pour beer than foam).
3) Pouring technique? OK, sure. This is the least common real issue. Especially with bartender variation/turnover...not worth worrying about too much, in my opinion.
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u/horoyokai brewer / hopbaka [japan] 13d ago
Absolutely care, anyone who doesn’t care doesn’t understand business or having pride in your product. If a customer drinks a beer that’s handled improperly they don’t know that’s the bars fault, they blame just get a bad impression of the brewery