No One Needs 30 Taps
Kimberly Clements via Twitter:
“I don’t know who needs to hear this - but no bar needs 30 taps these days. Only 6-8 of them make you any money anyway. $$ Love them the most. You’re welcome.”
It might look like a hot take, but based on the comments and my own keen powers of observation, it’s rather more a statement of the obvious. I’m not sure six is going to fly in some cities—maybe for restaurants—but it’s true that thirty is unnecessary. Even brewery taprooms don’t need more than twenty. (If you’re one of those places that has more and is doing well with it, godspeed and no offense intended—but your model is now a rarity.) The vast majority of consumer taste can be captured by a dozen well-selected handles.
I recall the era of the giant taplist starting in the early aughts. Interestingly, the first bars to embrace this model were in the outlying suburbs. The trend came to Portland when Henry’s Tavern opened around 2003 (don’t quote me). Located in the shell of the recently-shuttered Blitz-Weinhard brewery, it offered a hundred taps, and the vast, rectangular bar featured a strip of frozen real estate to cool your shaker pint. This coincided with craft beer’s second wind, when a new wave of breweries started opening. It was also the dawn of the era in which breweries started spinning off more and more one-off releases. Pubs like Henry’s became Willy Wonka-like destinations of excess and wonder.
I was certainly swept up by this, as well. Going to Henry’s was a lot of fun. I remember taking my Boston-based brother-in-law there one year and impressing him by finding exactly the beer he didn’t even know he wanted (Pelican’s much-missed Doryman’s Dark). It was our Everlasting Gobstopper moment.
I think we all know what came next with brewery explosions and exponential growth of beers. Based on brewery counts and the average number of beers they made, there were 10-15,000 different beers made in the U.S. twenty years ago. Today that number is probably around 300,000. The first hour at Willy Wonka’s factory is amazing, but you can only eat so much candy. Dazed with choice, we’re all retracting.
In an interesting irony, we actually see fewer types of beer on a typical taplist than we did a decade ago, despite the massive increase in supply. Because consumer preference was still unformed as well as uninformed, people were sampling everything. No style was too obscure or prosaic to sell. Today’s consumer knows what they want, though, and—at least on the west coast, it’s not amber ales or saisons or ESBs. Put one of those beers tap at a bar with 30 handles, and it’s going to sit there until it’s too old to serve. Managing large systems requires more time, money, and staff, none of which is well-spent on ten kegs slowly falling out of code in the cold room.
And the thing is, people aren’t clamoring for more choice. With a well-selected taplist, you’re going to adequately serve most of the people who walk in. Having a rotator or two for obscure styles will please those with more niche preferences.
I posted my “ideal” taplist on Twitter, intending to indicate a selection that serves nearly all needs: 2 American IPAs, a hazy IPA, a DIPA (hazy or other), a pale ale, pilsner, a rotating lager, a dark beer in the 5 - 6.5% range, a non-IPA strong beer, one Belgian-style beer, something our/tart/wild ale, and a rotator of a niche style. You may quibble at the margins, and different regions are going to want slightly different configurations (one hazy ain’t gonna cut it in Boston!). But from both the consumer and retailer perspective, twelve taps is fine.
The conversation on Twitter was entertaining, incidentally, and I invite you to go have a look. I did want to address one comment that cropped up. A few commenters noted with implied dyspepsia that if you only needed twelve taps, you don’t need 9,000 breweries. It’s one of those glib comments that is meant to cut through perceived BS, but which is in fact too clever by half.
“Need” does all the heavy lifting in that sentence, but it’s a dumb frame. Starbucks serves exactly the same drinks in every one of their 16,000 coffee shops nationwide (per Statista). Does America “need” one more? Well, if you live in a small town or neighborhood that doesn’t have one and you’re a Starbucks fan, then yeah, you absolutely do need one. Most breweries are small and serve a small footprint. The brewery explosion of the teens was actually backfilling, as breweries arrived in places they’d never been before. Breweries can also serve that 1% of drinkers who don’t want one of those 12 beers—or want more than one example. Dovetail, Notch, De Garde; these breweries are valuable because they serve a smaller group of fans who like unpopular styles.
No one ever complains that we have too many coffee shops, even though most of them serve basically the same thing. No one complains we have too many wineries, though they exceed breweries (12,000 in 2023). I’m never sure why people both point to brewery counts as some valuable metric to the health of the industry. There’s an oversupply now, but that has to do with production capacity, wholesaler consolidation, retailer consolidation, and the threat of other alcoholic beverages.
Okay, rant done!