Working as a bar manager at a Yard House Restaurant comes with its own set of challenges. Chief among them is managing the massive array of draft beer that’s offered. Each of the chain’s 20 outlets serves an average of 130 different drafts, and managing that inventory is a better-than-full-time job.
But the post is not without its plusses. Before every shift, bar managers conduct quality checks of a number of the chain’s craft brews, looking for proper temps and freshness. Yes, they have to taste the stuff.
“It’s not all bad, for sure,” says Kip Snider, beverage director at the Irvine, Calif.-based chain. “It’s just like a walk-through on the food line when you’re tasting sauces and checking temperatures. You have a checklist and you follow it.”
From checking the temperature in a Yard House keg room (34 F to 37 F) to “pulling a pint” and checking it with a thermometer in the glass, managers ensure the beer is ready to serve to guests.
But the real checking happens long before the glow of ale fills the glass, Snider says. Not only does he expect brewers and distributors to manage their beers’ temperatures all throughout the supply line, he expects managers to maintain the taps and the thousands of feet of tubing that feed them.
“Overall, everyone (in the supply chain) does a pretty good job of handling things, and we only get about 15 to 20 bad barrels a year,” Snider comments. The chain’s Las Vegas unit alone sells 200 barrels of beer a week. “Out of all the barrels we go through, that’s very little. Those are just random errors.”
Snider says the vast majority of beer distributors serving Yard House use refrigerated trucks. But even when those who don’t deliver a keg as warm as 85 degrees, it can be chilled and ready to serve in about a half day.
The chain’s electronic beverage management system handles proper product rotation, but cleaning the vital pipelines that convey that beer is yeoman’s work handled by the staff. Each time a keg is emptied, fresh water is forced through the line and out the tap. Monthly, however, the lines are soaked and cleansed with sanitizers. Fresh water is again pushed through, followed by a dye that darkens impurities and solids that might remain. Lines used to draw unfiltered wheat beers, Snider says, are the hardest to maintain.
“If you don’t clean those lines regularly, yeast builds up inside them,” he said. “And the longer that wheat sits there, the quicker it builds up. From that you might have foaming issues, and it’ll restrict the flow of beer, which you can see at the tap.”
Snider says such buildup can affect the flavor negatively, but that overall, “it’s not going to hurt you. It’s not dangerous, but it’s not good. Overall it’s just kind of nasty looking if you don’t clean the lines.”
Hardest on beer flavor and texture are lines that aren’t cooled between the keg and the tap. Some Yard House lines extend 180 feet between those two points, but since they’re refrigerated across the full length, there’s no loss of quality, he said.
“If it’s not cold the whole way, you’ll at least have foaming problems,” he explains. “Just running a shorter line isn’t going to solve the problem. You see a lot of places just pour it down the drain until they get to the cold beer. We don’t do that.”