If you run a brewery, you already keep one tap list current: the one in Untappd. Somebody kegs a new beer, they open the app, they add it to the menu, they pull the empty one. It happens at the bar, on a phone, in about a minute.
Then there is every other place that same list lives. The website. The chalkboard. The TV over the bar. The printed menu on the tables. The PDF someone made in March. Each one is a separate chore, and the chores are the reason the website says a beer is on tap when it kicked two weeks ago.
The fix is not more discipline. The fix is letting the one list you already maintain feed everything else. Here are five ways to do that, in the order I would tackle them, all drawn from how Republic Brewing Company runs today.
1. Put the live tap list on the website, styled like your brand
The obvious first step, and the one most breweries stop at, is the Untappd embed. Untappd for Business gives you a snippet, you paste it into a page, and a tap list appears. It works. It also looks like Untappd, not like you, and it loads after the rest of the page with somebody else’s fonts and buttons.
The better version pulls the same data behind the scenes and renders it as part of your site. Same beers, same order, same ABV and style, but in your typography, your colors, your card layout. The customer never sees a widget. They see your beer menu, and it happens to be correct.
At Republic, the tap list on the homepage and on the full beer menu page is generated from Untappd and rebuilt on a schedule through the day. Peter edits Untappd. That is the whole workflow. A new beer shows up on the site within about half an hour, and nothing about the page says “third party.”
What to ask for: a beer menu that reads from Untappd but looks like the rest of the site. If your web person says the embed is the only option, that is the limit of their setup, not of Untappd.
2. Run the taproom TV from the same feed
Most brewery tap boards are one of three things: a chalkboard someone dreads updating, a slideshow built in a presentation app and loaded from a thumb drive, or an Untappd TV theme with the default look.
There is a fourth option. Build a page on your own site designed for a big screen, feed it the same tap list, and open it on whatever cheap streaming stick is plugged into the TV. It refreshes itself. It matches the website exactly, because it is the website.
Republic’s 75-inch board over the bar is a page on republicbrewingcompany.com. It refreshes every few minutes, stays fullscreen, and keeps the TV from falling asleep. When Peter pulls a beer in Untappd, the board catches up on its own. Nobody climbs a ladder. Nobody touches a thumb drive.
What to ask for: a “TV” page with big type, no navigation, and automatic refresh. If it can run on a $30 streaming stick, it can run anywhere.
3. Generate the printed menu from the feed too
This is the one that actually saves the most time, and the one almost nobody does.
Printed menus go stale because printing requires a person to open a layout file, edit the beers, export a PDF, and send it to the printer or the office copier. That chain is long enough that people skip it, which is why the table menu at a lot of breweries is a suggestion, not a list.
Instead: design the print menu once, as a page on the site that is laid out for paper. Letter, tabloid, whatever your print shop or your office printer wants. Then have the site generate a real PDF from that page every time the tap list changes. The download link on the site always points at the current file.
Republic’s beer menu PDF regenerates automatically whenever the Untappd list changes. Peter clicks Download, prints, and puts it on the tables. The layout auto-fits, so a heavy week with more beers on tap tightens the type a little rather than spilling onto a second page.
What to ask for: a print menu page with a Download PDF button that is always current. Not a “print this page” button, which produces browser headers, wrong margins, and a page break through the stouts.
4. Let the brewery own the descriptions, not Untappd
Untappd descriptions are written for the app. They are often long, sometimes stale, and occasionally written by whoever set the beer up three years ago. They are fine on a phone. They are wrong for a printed menu, where every sentence costs space.
The approach that has worked: keep the tap list itself from Untappd (what is on, in what order, with style and ABV), but let the brewery write its own one or two line description per beer in a simple form. The print menu merges the two by beer name. The website and the TV board can stay descriptions-free, which keeps them fast to scan.
This sounds like a small thing. It is the difference between a printed menu that reads like a menu and one that reads like a database dump.
What to ask for: a place to write short descriptions that survive the Untappd sync, so nobody has to re-enter them every time a beer comes back on.
5. Use the feed for the small stuff that adds up
Once the tap list is data your site can read, it can show up wherever it is useful:
- Labels and can art next to each beer, pulled from the same feed, so the beer menu doubles as a gallery of your branding.
- “Kitchen open until” and “what’s on tap” on the homepage in the first screen, because that is what the person on their phone in the parking lot is checking.
- Search results. A page with a real, current list of beers and styles is something Google can index. A PDF from March and an image of a chalkboard are not.
- Social graphics. “New on tap” posts can be built from the same data rather than retyped.
None of these are worth a project on their own. All of them come nearly free once step one is done.
The rule underneath all of this
Every place your tap list appears should read from one source, and that source should be the one your staff already updates. If someone has to update two things, one of them will be wrong by Friday.
Untappd is a perfectly good source. Most breweries already treat it as one. The job of your website is to stop being a second place to maintain and start being the place the list shows up.
If your site cannot do that today, it is worth a conversation. That is most of what I build for breweries, and it is the part owners tell me they notice every single week.
See how brewery websites come together or look at the Republic Brewing site.
