Brian Winckel is the founder of Brewlytics and a former professional brewer at Heretic and Calicraft.
However, then again, if you have a taproom, then you already are familiar with the headline numbers. First-half production of craft decreased by 4%. For the past 2 years, the world has been experiencing more closures than openings. Almost 500 brewers prematurely shuttered their doors last year. Tap turnover is treading lightly, prices have risen, and as the Brewers Association reported in its midyear guide, the decline is continuing.
Here’s the number from that same report that almost nobody quoted: 57% of taprooms reported growth. Forty-three percent reported declines. Every single category of craft brewery had more members growing than shrinking.
Sit with that for a second, because it changes what kind of problem this is. If the whole market were simply drying up, everyone would be down. Instead,d the majority of taprooms are up while a large minority are closing. That isn’t a tide going out. That’s a redistribution: the same drinkers, fewer places, and a very uneven split between the taprooms that keep them and the taprooms that don’t.
Which means the useful question isn’t “how bad is the market.” It’s “what are the ones that are growing doing differently?”
The instinct that makes it worse
When traffic dips, the reflex is to discount. Happy hour gets longer. The $4 pint appears. A deal goes out to the email list.
The problem is arithmetic. If your margin on a pint is three dollars and you cut a dollar off the price, you need a third more pints just to stand still. In a market where fewer people are walking through the door, that’s a lot of extra volume to manufacture. And discounts are indiscriminate; they go to the person who was coming anyway just as readily as to the person you’re trying to attract. You’ve bought visits you already had.
There’s a second cost that shows up later. Discounting trains people to wait. Once a drinker learns the Tuesday price, Saturday’s price starts to look like a markup. Instead of building lasting demand, a discounted taproom day may simply shift visits to the cheapest hours, teaching your best customers to come when you make the least.
None of that means never run a deal. It means a discount is a tool for a specific job, and “business is slow” is not that job.
The real leak is the second visit
Most taprooms have a reasonable idea how many people came in last month. Very few know how many of them had ever been in before.
That gap matters more than almost anything else on the P&L, because the two numbers describe completely different businesses. A hundred first-timers who never return is a marketing problem that resets every month. Forty regulars who come twice a month is a business.
Think about what you actually spend to get a first-timer through the door. The event, the ad, the festival booth, the Instagram push, the collaboration release. Now think about what you spend to get a regular back. Usually nothing; they just come. The first visit is the expensive one. Every visit after that is nearly free, and that’s where the margin lives.
So the highest-leverage number in the building is the percentage of first-timers who come back within a month, often because they enjoyed the experience and the quality of the fresh beer. If you don’t know yours, you’re guessing at the one figure that most determines whether you’re in the 57% or the 43%.
And when a taproom does start measuring it, the usual reaction is dismay. The rate is almost always lower than people assume. That’s not a failure; it’s the first honest look at a leak that was always there.
Why people actually come back
Here’s the part that frustrates operators, because it isn’t about the beer.
Your beer is good. I’ll take that as given; it’s table stakes now, and in a county with a dozen taprooms, “we make good beer” is not a position. Nobody drives past three breweries for a marginally better pale ale.
They drive past three breweries because somebody there knows them.
That’s the thing a regular is actually buying. Not the liquid. The nod when they walk in. The bartender who remembers they didn’t finish the smoked porter and steers them away from the next one. The sense of having a place. It’s the oldest thing in hospitality, and it’s the hardest thing for a competitor to copy, because it isn’t on the menu.
The trouble is that it lives entirely in one person’s head, behind one specific bar, on shifts that person happens to work. On a slow Tuesday, a good bartender gives everyone that treatment. On a packed Saturday, with three deep at the rail, they physically can’t, not for lack of skill, but because there aren’t enough seconds. And when that bartender leaves, which in this industry they do, the whole relationship archive walks out with them.
That’s the gap. Not a shortage of good intentions. A shortage of memory that survives volume and turnover.
What this looks like in practice
You don’t need software to start on this. You need to decide the information is worth keeping.
Measure the second-visit rate. Your POS already knows. If you run a loyalty program or take card payments, you can see how many distinct customers in a given month had transacted with you before. Pull it once a quarter. Watch the direction, not the absolute number.
Spend your rewards on the second visit, not the tenth. Most loyalty programs reward volume, which means they pay regulars for behavior that was already happening. The expensive gap is between visit one and visit two. A reason to come back next week is worth more than a free pint on the tenth.
Make the knowledge portable. If your staff remember things about regulars, and they do, give that a home outside their heads. A shared note, a tag on an account, anything. The goal is that a new bartender on a Saturday can serve a regular like someone who knows them.
Ask the one question that matters. “Have you been in before?” Train it as a habit. Not to upsell, to find out. It’s the cheapest data collection in hospitality, and most taprooms never do it.
Count reorders, not ratings. What a customer says they loved is a story about who they’d like to be. What they order a second time is the truth. Even the last breweries to adapt to changing customer preferences can learn from these repeat orders, so your tap list decisions should be weighted toward the second number.
Where I admit my bias
This gap is why my company exists, so discount me accordingly. We build Barley and a brewery-side analytics layer that connects to a taproom’s POS and does what a good bartender’s memory does: tracks which beers earn repeat orders, who’s turning into a regular, and which first-timers never came back so it survives a busy Saturday and a staff change.
I’m not neutral, and I won’t pretend to be. But none of the five things above require buying anything from me or anyone else. They require deciding that the identity of your customers is worth knowing, which is a decision that costs nothing and which most taprooms, in good times, never had to make.
The market isn’t choosing for you
I spent fourteen years self-employed before this, most of it in rooms where people drink, and I’ve been on the wrong side of a soft quarter more than once. The thing I’d tell myself then is this: a contracting market feels like weather, but 57% growth against 43% decline is not weather. Weather hits everyone.
The drinkers haven’t gone anywhere. The Brewers Association’s own read is that demand for craft beer hasn’t disappeared; people still seek out taprooms for fresh draft and a local room, because those are the two things that can’t be replicated at a grocery store. There are just fewer of those drinkers to go around, and they’re consolidating toward the places that make them feel like regulars.
Your beer got you considered, but being the room where somebody remembers you is what gets you the next five years. A midyear report can track that progress, showing how memorable taproom experiences turn first-time visitors into loyal customers.
