Is draft a deal breaker?

I don't order bottled beer at restaurants (unless it's a beer bar with rares)

I'd rather have a cocktail.

 

If the boh can back up the foh decision to go weak on a tap selection. I can maintain interest. If not. See ya.

 

I drink at restaurants and bars more for the experience of drinking socially than for the taps, so it I don't care whether the beer comes from taps or bottles.

 

I love barrel aged dark beers so this would be right up my alley. Usually drink at home so it would be a bar I'd go out to just to break the monotony and be social.

 

For a restaurant, bottles only would be fine.

 

A good bottle selection that supports a short (or in this case nonexistent) tap list is always welcome. There are plenty of situations where it's advantageous to go out and having an extended beer cellar gives everyone a chance to find something. This is especially the case if the place has a bunch of stouts, sours, and other beers that sometimes benefit from aging.

For example a bar near a tourist area or convention center would benefit from having bottles. If you're traveling you could go on the cheap side and buy a few beers from a bottle shop and sit with your family or coworkers in your hotel room drinking it out of plastic cups or those small whiskey glasses they always have (unless you travel with glassware like a pro). Or you could take them out for a few drinks of amazing beer at a bar that just happens to serve from bottles and enjoy it in the company of good food, ambiance, and other people. The same goes for walking around checking out attractions in a city where you want to stop and have a good beer someplace to add to the enjoyment of the day. Good beer is good beer whether it's in a keg or a bottle. Now if you're some hole in the wall place out in the middle of nowhere or you're in a location saturated with bars that serve good beer on tap then you're setting yourself up for failure...

 

Why on earth go to a bar and drink bottled beer ? As far as I'm concerned I love pubs for the fact that they can serve beer in a form which transcends the same stuff from a bottle or can or keg. Bottles are for places when they are the best you can manage.

 

no taps, no point.

go to a liquor store if you only want bottles.

 

A flute with no holes is not a flute.

 

Not a deal breaker for a restaurant, I'd be leery of a craft beer bar that doesn't have draft

 

There are 2 beers on this menu that I really want, 1 is draught & 1 is bottled. I'm going with the draft. If there is nothing on the draft menu that I want but there is something on the bottle menu then I go bottle. I will always order the draft first so long as there are things on draft I want.

Don't think I've ever been to a bar without at least 3-4 taps. If it's BMC, I'm probably moving on to something in a bottle. But I can usually find a draft I want.

 

There's a local bar/bottle shop that I go to specifically to drink the bottles/cans. They carry a large selection of cold beer in their coolers, so it's convenient to pick one out and start drinking. They have taps, but I rarely get one of those beers. So it definitely wouldn't be a deal breaker if a bar/restaurant had zero taps, as long as they still had a good beer selection.


Granted I'd prefer a bar/restaurant to have at least a few taps.

 

I would go in a heartbeat if:
a) beer wasn't too expensive
b) the bottles and cans wer excellent beers that I can't find at my area shops that I want to try and enjoy (smuggled in out of distribution area or local beers that aren't typically sold in bottle shops)

Being on tap isn't necessary, just good, hard to acquire beer. That is pretty much the only reason I go out to have a beer anyway vs. drinking with friends at our houses!

 

When I was in Belgium I was surprised at how relatively unimportant draft beer was. There, people seemed to expect bottled beer in the appropriate (and by appropriate I don't mean appropriate style, I mean the brewery's own branded glass) glassware. Of course so many of those beers are "refermentee en bouteille."

But the US is much more of a draft beer culture. When I had my craft beer bar, we sold very little percentage-wise in bottles and in fact one of our (many) major mistakes was overstocking bottles in our first orders from distributors, at a cost of $$$ we could have used later...

Going draftless, I imagine you are considering this because of the lack of a draft system or space to put it in? That would take some big brass balls IMO but I think it could work if you had an EXTREMELY cool bottle list, which might require extensive pre-opening schmoozing/relationship building with the best local breweries and whoever the local Shelton-esque or 12 Per Cent-ish distributor is, because sometimes (always?) the coolest bottles are saved for the biggest volume retailers, as a reward.

You would have to establish yourself, preferably pre-opening, in the local mind (the local mind of both customers and wholesalers) as THE place to go for one-offs and cool shit and rarities, I would think. In which case maybe a smaller place? For this concept I might rather have 1800 square feet in the hippest retail area in town than 3500 in something lesser, even at 2x the rent in the smaller place.

 

That sounds like a "bottle shop"? Except with a Bottles Only Bar (BOB?) instead of being able to take the beer home, you pay an increased mark up to drink the beer there. Not sure I get the appeal. Especially when there are bottle shops that have taps for on site consumption, growler/grunt/crowler fill options from the taps to take home AND the ability to pay retail for a bottle that can be chilled (if warm) and consumed on site for no extra fee.

In order for the BOB to work for me, it would need to be killer bottles and no hassle just a markup. So I can have 2 KBS bottles in a sitting if I want? Okay, I'll pay the markup and enjoy them there. But that just sounds so incredibly unlikely to me and honestly I'd rather buy those 2 bottles and have them at home when I want. Just my take though!

 

well, all the other things that make a great bar would have to be there--comfort, service, atmosphere, babes, vibe.

You don't go to bars to drink alcohol--even draft beer, where a $150 keg is sold to you, the consumer, at $550-650 (depending on waste and aggressiveness in pricing)--in the cheapest possible way.

But I agree, a hard sell IMO.

 

I've been to one bar in the US that fits your description: 124 Rabbit Club in the West Village, NYC. A tiny, dark, hip basement room with an extensive bottle list (mostly Belgian/European) and no food. They occasionally have a tap or two available but not always. I love that place for occasional visits but I'm not sure I could make it my regular hangout.

 

True, but you also don't go to pay a hefty markup on something you could just buy at the store. I have on many occasions had bottles at bars but they were always something somewhat hard to find like a 'loon or to get something for a friend to try.

 

Bottle/can markup is typically not far from being equal to (can be even less than) draft markup, though.

But I agree, to make this work a high percentage of the bottles/cans on the menu have to be things that you actually can't count on being able to get at the store, 'loons being one good example. I've stated throughout things like "a hard sell IMO" and "that would take some big brass balls" so we aren't in disagreement here.