Why You Need Digital Drink Menus
If you own a bar, you are busy. Period. Opening the bar, serving customers and closing the bar is hard work. There are an endless list of details that need to be addressed like managing what’s on tap, keeping everything clean, not to mention ensuring your customers are happy. Another big piece of this puzzle is maintaining the brand and style of your bar – modern, farmhouse chic, sports, English pub, etc. Within that brand you’ll have certain aspects that need to “fit”.
For example, if you run a tavern style pub with low light and a historical feel, an arcade game could feel out of place. Conversely, when you’re touting the number of TV screens you have for football season, it’s likely you’ve got other bar games for patrons to play. The approach you take to displaying your drink list is another component of your bar’s brand.
Chalkboards are fairly common these days in beer bars and for good reason – they look great when wrought with an artistic flair. But maybe you don’t have the space for one so instead you rely on paper menus spread throughout. There are plenty of options to show off what’s on tap but few are as efficient as the digital version.
You will have to invest some money but considering the main piece of equipment is a TV with HDMI inputs, you won’t be breaking the bank. Right now at Best Buy, there is a 43” Smart 4K Ultra HD tube on sale for $500. Though “Smart 4K” may be overkill for a unit devoted to drink menus, the point is you can find deals all the time.
Another consideration is the concern that a TV won’t flow with your bar’s theme. You might be worried it will stick out like a sore thumb if you’ve styled your place with reclaimed lumber, Edison-style filament bulbs and farmhouse table tops. True, a shiny black appliance might not be the most logical addition to this environment but with some creativity you can make it work.
Let’s say you already have a chalkboard and want to keep it. You could mount the TV right on top of the board and go to work surrounding it with semi-permanent drawings all related to your bar. Contact some local artists (Instagram is a great place to find them) to come in on a quarterly basis and add something new. Given the amount of work that goes into this, you want the artist to be able to show off their skills for an extended period. And your customers get to enjoy an ever-changing “wallpaper” of art!
But the bottom line is that you need to be as efficient as possible given all the responsibilities of running a bar. Getting on a ladder with an eraser to update your chalkboard or printing a new paper version every time you have a new offering doesn’t fall into the category of efficiency. However, using a simple tool like the digital drink board hardware from TapHunter does. Simply plug in the deck-of-cards sized device into your TV’s HDMI port and you’re ready to roll. You can even customize the menu to reflect your branding. So if you do end up mounting your television on a chalkboard, the team at TapHunter can give you a digitalized chalkboard menu.
