Stanley Beer Hall is a fast-casual restaurant in the growing Stapleton neighborhood of Aurora, Colorado. It offers delicious classic American cuisine, including the Denver Burger Battle’s Best Burger for 2 years in a row, enriched with a wide variety of local Colorado craft beers, wines, and cocktails.
From the time Stanley Beer Hall officially opened its doors in December 2016, it underwent some major changes, including a total refit of its traditional bar into the first version of its self-pour beverage wall, and then another complete retrofit to a cutting edge self-pour beverage system when the previous provider failed to meet expectations.
Today, Stanley Beer Hall is a successful restaurant and taproom with a large core demographic of regular neighborhood locals as well as a steady stream of new customers. In 2019, the restaurant hosted more than 163,000 guests and processed 88,000 transactions.
But let’s start from their beginnings. Sadly, things were not always going as smoothly as they are right now. After having significant operational and financial challenges during the restaurant’s first few months, the owners decided to get help. It was recommended to hire an industry professional consultant: they ended up hiring Jim Wright. Mr. Wright had been operating several well-known and popular venues and restaurants in the Denver area. This includes Denver Union Station, the Denver Performing Arts Complex restaurants, and the Denver Art Museum restaurant called Palettes (listed as one of the top ten museum restaurants in the world).
When Jim accepted the job and came on board, the Beer Hall had been open for just under a year and was losing a significant amount of money. The business did not seem to generate enough revenue and suffered from several operational issues: slow and inefficient seating, confusing food order flow resulting in long wait times and mis-delivered food, and worst of all, very slow beer, wine and cocktail service. Cocktails would often arrive at the table after the food was delivered. And unfortunately, Stanley Beer Hall became known for this problem.
Something had to change. After analyzing the Beer Hall’s main problems, Jim decided he would need to completely retool the operation.
At this point, the Beer Hall still had a traditional bar. But as he was beginning to identify the core issues, Jim made a visit to a taproom with self-pour technology. This inspired him to take the leap and make self-pour a part of Stanley Beer Hall’s experience as well. He predicted that this might address several of the issues the restaurant was facing and simultaneously generate buzz and attract more traffic.
In January 2018 the entire restaurant was closed for almost a month to remodel the entire space and rebuild the traditional beverage dispensing system into a self-pour beverage wall. They tore out the entire existing bar and built a walk-in cooler to go along with the beverage wall.
It didn’t take long for Jim’s gamble to be proven successful. The very first day the system got up and running in February 2018, people immediately fell in love with it. Jim explained, “The self-pour is attractive to our customers because of its convenience and freedom to pour anything by the ounce at their own pace, and it is genuinely fun when compared to our previous traditional bar.”
As the operator, one of Jim’s favorite benefits of self-pour is the system’s social aspect and the unique experience it brings to his guests. The freedom customers have without relying on a bartender or having to wait for busy waiters often encourages them to engage with each other and talk about their favorite drinks and the idea of self-pour in general. More than that, it keeps them coming back for more and telling their friends about it. Even strangers frequently and happily help those less familiar with the system, making new acquaintances or later even friends in their neighborhood.
Self-pour not only helped Jim with some operational issues that the restaurant was facing the first few months, but it also helped Stanley Beer Hall become a bigger part of the community.
However, a few weeks after the new install, Jim realized he may have gone with the wrong self-pour provider. The Beer Hall was starting to face some technical and operational challenges with the system itself, and support from the provider was unfortunately not very helpful.
“Our biggest pain point with iPourIt’s technology was the amount of money we were spending on our own success. iPourIt’s pay-per-ounce business model meant that they basically became our equity partner, and we had to pay them for every ounce of drinks we sold.” Says Jim and further explains: “We pour about 250,000 to 300,000 ounces of beer per month during our busy summer months, so we ended paying iPourIt between $2200 or $3000 for monthly support that we never really received, or at least it felt that way since our phone calls to them were often ignored.”
Jim also struggled with using their product database. Every time he wanted to offer a new beer that was not in their database, he had to manually send the provider an email so they could add it in, and only then could he finally offer it on his tap and reflect it on the screens. This process would often take 2-3 days.
This issue, combined with the poor response from the provider’s support team, led the Stanley Beer Hall staff to resort to makeshift solutions such as using printed paper for signage on malfunctioning screens and on screens with beers not in the database. This, of course, ruined much of the appeal of the tech for the customer, as they were not able to touch the screens and learn more about the product. And due to the limitations of this provider’s tech, customers also could not see how much beer/wine/other beverage was being poured in real-time.
In addition to the unresponsive support and problems with the self-pour tablets, Jim explained the challenges of running a side-by-side system and the inability to integrate with POS providers. Due to Stanley Beer Hall’s wide variety food menu with several options on most selections, the Beer Hall requires a full POS system.
When Jim came onboard, he realized the current POS was incapable of handling the needs of the Beer Hall. They quickly replaced the system with MyAxisPoint POS. The improvement in food service was immediate. This unfortunately did not resolve the side-by-side technology issues. The self-pour system and MyAxisPoint could not communicate with each other as iPourIt did not integrate with other POS systems. Despite the challenges, Stanley Beer Hall stayed with their self-pour provider for around a year and a half, until enough was enough.
When Jim’s patience reached its limit, he decided to take a radical step in the Spring of 2019 and approached another self-pour provider to come and help: this was PourMyBeer.
Realizing that an integration with the POS would be an absolute must, Jim asked MyAxisPoint POS and PourMyBeer to work together on a solution – thankfully both companies agreed, and were able to make an integration work. 90 days later, the interface was complete. Timing was critical, as summer is always Stanley’s Beer Hall’s busiest time of the year, and the changeover required closing for a full day. So, they waited to make a change until the season passed.
On September 17th, 2019, they moved forward, retrofitting iPourIt with PourMyBeer’s technology. They haven’t looked back since. Customers are now able to fully experience the fun and ease of self-pour without any of the issues. Thanks to PourMyBeer’s full and smooth integration with MyAxisPoint, Stanley Beer Hall’s workflow is now much more efficient and problem-free. It’s enabling Jim’s team to check guests in with four simple touches of a tablet.
Operations such as opening and closing tabs are now 100% handled on the MyAxisPoint POS terminal, without the need to use a separate terminal from the self-pour provider like before. In addition to the enhanced guest experience and labor savings, the Beer Hall’s transaction average has increased by 85.4¢ per check or 2.7% – Jim attributes 100% of the additional revenue capture to the PourMyBeer and MyAxisPoint POS interface.
With PourMyBeer, Stanley Beer Hall is going strong and shows no signs of slowing down. Their sales were up 17.9% in 2019 over 2018. Best of all, Beer Hall customers are able to check in and get pouring in less than 30 seconds. When they do, their experience is as smooth and fun as ever!
For more information on PourMyBeer.com please contact PourMyBeer at cheers@pourmybeer.com or (312) 416-9989.
For more information on the MyAxisPoint POS and PourMyBeer interface please visit www.beertappos.com. Email: taps@myaxispoint.com or call (720) 996-1115
