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What’s on tap at Yard House? State-of-the-art suds management

IRVINE Calif. America’s craft beer resurgence has changed casual dining’s operations in recent years, as one look inside a Yard House Restaurant readily attests. Like brass-gilded cattails spouting from the bank of a pond, an average of 130 draught handles greets anyone bellying up to the bar. One unit sports a staggering 250 choices, underscoring the diversity of beers that fit the tastes and wallets of today’s casual patrons.

Some restaurants struggle to manage just a few taps. How does Yard House keep 50 times that array flowing and fresh?

Finding good beer is the easy part, says Kip Snider, beverage director for the 20-unit chain.  Developing and maintaining a system of sourcing, purchasing, receiving and selling that variety takes diligence, he stresses.

“I consider myself pretty knowledgeable about beer, but I have others who help” find new ones, he says. “We set up an order guide with every beer distributor we use, and that’s updated and sent to me on a monthly basis. It lets us know what’s out there if we can’t get what we want and have to replace one with another beer of the same style.”

At each restaurant, beer is received and stocked in the same manner as food: Labeled, dated and staged in order of intended use. The beer is held inside a “keg room” chilled to about 35 F. A typical one measures about 800-square-feet and is rimmed with enormous windows that afford guests an inside look. Like ivy climbing brick faces, clear, plastic beer lines travel the cooler’s inside walls and snake toward taps outside. Between clusters of beer lines are lines filled with icy glycol to ensure temperature maintenance along the full, twisting route.

“A lot of restaurants don’t do that, and so the first beer you pull off is warm and foamy, and that’s waste,” Snider says.

Using an electronic monitoring system, levels are set for each keg to trigger reorder notices when necessary.

Yet despite such helpful technology, pre-shift walk-throughs are conducted by bar managers to check beer temperatures and freshness. Snider estimates some 50 pints per week are poured down the drain during quality checks.

To keep their hop chops up, wait staffs receive beer training at least three times a year to rehearse the basics and educate them on new beers coming onto the menu. Despite their knowledge, Snider says, servers aren’t instructed to educate customers on Yard House’s selections unless asked. The company’s theory is customers know what they want and will ask for guidance if needed.

“Truthfully, there aren’t that many guests who ask for that,” Snider says, adding that Yard House’s beer list is organized alphabetically, not by style. “When they need some help, we usually ask, ‘What do you normally drink?’ If it’s Sam Adams, then we tell them what we have to offer that would be like that.”

Yard House doesn’t brew its own beers, though Firestone Walker Brewing Co. makes a private-label brew for the chain. The chain’s top seller is Blue Moon, and of the top 25 overall sellers, 12 are hefeweizens (unfiltered wheat beers that pair well with food). Perhaps not surprisingly, top-sellers No. 2 and No. 3 are light lagers from American mega-brewers.

When asked why it serves such a wide variety of microbrews when such popular beers make up a large percentage of sales, Snider said Yard House’s job is “to sell them what they want and provide a lot of options.” Since it does a good job of managing its lower-selling brands, Snider said it’s not a matter of having too many to handle. “We know how much of everything we need to sell to keep it. It’s got to sell at least a keg a month or it’s moving out.”

But, Snider stresses, selling beer successfully isn’t just about offering a lot of them. He attributes much of the company’s image as a source of quality suds to the caliber of its menu.

“It shows we’re not a pub or bar, that there’s much more to it,” says Snider. Indeed, when craft breweries took off in the early 1980s, many later failed because they didn’t offer food with their liquid grains. Snider said pairing food and beer is both natural for the palate, and the endless number of combinations widens the range of possibilities for both.

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