• AA5B@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    A pub near me has a serve-yourself beer wall that works pretty well without a bartender. It meters by the ounce but that means everything has to be the same price.

    I have no idea if that would scale to larger, busier places or where people are likely to get drunk.

    That approach wouldn’t work for cocktails but there’s no reason you can’t have a drink maker for at least the most common stuff. But that doesn’t work for crowds or personal service, and could never cover the vast number of possible combinations

    • aesthelete@lemmy.world
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      7 days ago

      A place near me has this too, and it’s usually very empty. The thing is that it is not that serving beers and mixed liquids isn’t automatable; it’s that nobody is going to sit on a bar stool and talk to a kegerator.

      • Bronzebeard@lemmy.zip
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        5 days ago

        The one near me isn’t set up like a line of stools at a bar. It’s a ton of tables all over the place with some arcade/bar games strewn around. In a college area so fills up pretty easily at night

    • SolarMonkey@slrpnk.net
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      7 days ago

      I went to a taphouse like this. You were issued a lanyard with an rfid chip in it that was linked to your tab. You’d scan the chip on the tap you wanted, and pour as much or little as you like into your glassware of choice. It had the price listed on the description screen for each tap, and would charge according to what you poured, down to a pretty small amount, because you control the tap handle. Want to try a small splash for a quarter? You can!

      So yes it absolutely can scale larger. This place has I think 50+ taps, and because they only needed a few people for staff for dozens of tables (they had a limited cold food menu or it could have been one person easily), the overhead seemed like it was pretty low.

      We went at an off-time, but they said they stay pretty busy on weekends and stuff.