Plan Your Meetings

Beer here: October 2007 Monthly Morsel

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Working an event recently, I did my usual schtick and said I wanted to do the bar inventory by counting beer caps. The property said they would make these arrangements … and then didn’t.

What did they do? They served the beer in cans instead of bottles.

What didn’t I like about this? A lot — the profit margin is higher in canned beer than it is in bottles and, for the most part, the guests don’t like it as much. It doesn’t taste as good, and it is much harder to do inventory at the end of the day. So, please make sure you put in the contract that beer has to be served in bottles to makes sure you get what you want.

Last but not least — and this happens at 95 percent of the places with a hosted bar —stress to bartenders that if you see any money on the bar in the form of a tip, you will take it and donate it. No matter how much they know this rule, they still put out tip cups, and this drives me crazy. If they want to take a tip, they should put it in their pocket and be done with it. Anything less is unacceptable.

Bottoms up!

— Claire R. Gould

Claire R. Gould is the owner of Rx for Catering, LLC, a culinary and logistics company that works globally negotiating and designing menus for meetings and events. Her company has done work for Coca-Cola, IBM, Honeywell and Randstad, among others. Gould teaches and writes about culinary and banquet trends and topics, and publishes a quarterly online newsletter “The Claire Diaries.” If you have any feedback for her, please leave a comment.