Bar Blender Basics

Below are some points to consider when purchasing one of the most essential pieces of bar equipment, the bar blender. Commercial blenders offer many features for making custom frozen drinks. Using programmable controls, speed/power sequences, variable speed pulse options, automatic ramping and shut-off, as well as digital readouts, commercial blenders should deliver smooth and consistent beverages with little operator assistance.

Just a few things to consider before purchasing a commercial blender:

Horsepower – Choose a blender with at least a 2-HP motor, a blender with less horsepower will chop the ice into irregular sized pieces.

Controls – Blenders that produce perfect frozen drinks feature advanced electronics that automate the duration, speed, sequence and power level of each blending step.

Customization Capabilities – Blenders that offer custom programming provide consistent blending, while freeing-up busy bartenders.

Material and Design – For superior performance, a professional blender should have blades with sealed ball-bearing assemblies of the highest-grade stainless steel that maintains a honed, unbreakable edge, regardless of the hardness of ice or frozen ingredients. For safety, select units equipped with overheating protection. Blender base units with seamless, touch-sensitive panels offer protection from harmful bacterial growth and are easy to clean.

Containers – Blender containers should be built to fill to capacity and still blend drinks well. They should be tough, yet easy to clean. Polycarbonate is the industry-preferred material because it’s durable and ingredients can be seen while blending.

Drink Volume – The number and types of drinks that are served should be considered when purchasing blender equipment. If the volume will exceed 100 drinks per day, a pre-programmed portion ice shaver blender should be purchased so that ice is added automatically, preferably by ingredient weight. If serving 50-100 drinks per day, try a pre-programmed machine blending station for fast and efficient service. If you are making very thick frozen drinks, make sure the blender container is designed for extreme blending conditions.

Bar Equipment for a Busy Bar: Frozen Drink Machines

Frozen beverage machines are an ideal piece of bar equipment for bars that serve daiquiris and margaritas. Many frozen beverage machines allow the user to easily set the machine to make icy, frozen beverages or chilled beverages. This is a great feature for bars that specialize in margaritas, as you can easily dispense and serve your customers’ favorite drinks frozen or on the rocks.

Most frozen beverage machines are available in single, double or triple hopper form. With multiple hoppers you can easily offer multiple types of daiquiris and margaritas to your customers. Frozen beverage machines are also available in manual and automatic refill designs. Any piece of bar equipment with automated features can be a time saving device in busy bars.

Many frozen beverage machines feature touchpad displays, making them a very simple piece of bar equipment to operate. These displays also guide users on cleaning and preventative maintenance, making the frozen beverage machines extremely user friendly.

Looking Beyond the Beer Mug

You are probably already aware that specialty, craft beers are increasing in popularity in bars all across the country. These beers are often seen being served in an assorted variety of pilsner glasses, pint glasses, footed glassware, mugs and steins and snifters. However, do you know that the style of glassware in which the beer is served offers more than just an aesthetically pleasing beverage?

According to CraftBeer.com the glass in which a beer is served helps to enhance the beer’s flavor, aroma and head. How do you know which type of beer to serve in which glass? Easy, just use CraftBeer.com’s online beer glassware guide. The interactive tool allows you to click on a style of glassware, and then offers suggested types of beers that will benefit from that particular style of glass.

Once you have figured out which types of glassware are best suited to your bar’s beer offerings, click on over to Serv-U’s glassware section to purchase the glassware you need at the most competitive price.

Facebook Turns Virtual Drinks into Real Drinks

If you have ever received a virtual gift from a friend on Facebook, such as a stuffed animal, cocktail or a cupcake, you may have wished that the virtual gift was the real thing.

Well wish no more – a company called Bartab now makes that possible. Bartab allows users on Facebook to purchase drink vouchers for their friends that can be redeemed at participating bars and restaurants. The drink vouchers are inexpensive, costing the sender and recipient only $1.00 each ($1.00 to send and $1.00 to redeem).

This innovative marketing initiative involves social networking, cell phones and face-to-face interaction as forms of engagement. You send and receive the certificates on Facebook, then use a cell phone application or text message to redeem it from the bartender or server.

Right now there is no cost to the restaurants or bars who participate in Bartab’s Facebook application. According to Bartab’s website, restaurants and bars decide which drinks they would like to offer on Facebook, and keep the recipients $1.00 paid when they redeem their voucher. It has been noted that most recipients redeeming their drink vouchers will often purchase additional beverages or food while at the bar, and will typically bring friends or co-workers to the bar with them.

Bartab believes the service is smart for both consumers and bars. Users get inexpensive drinks and connections with friends, while bars get new customers at a low cost. At the moment, Bartab is available only in the San Francisco and Los Angeles areas and in New York, but Bartab is planning to add 17 markets in the next few months, including Seattle, Atlanta and Houston.

Learn more about how Bartab can increase traffic in your bar or restaurant by visiting their website: http://bartab.webtab.com/

When it comes to saving energy in a restaurant, how your restaurant uses and maintains its restaurant equipment and restaurant supplies can be just as important as what type of restaurant equipment you use. Buying and using an energy-efficient oven, for example, is undoubtedly a good starting point and could trim hundreds of dollars from your annual utility bills—but saving the most energy and money will require energy efficient restaurant equipment along with good energy practices.

1. Cut idle time. Do you really need to leave all of your restaurant equipment on, or on standby, all of the time? Leaving appliances on standby costs you money, so implement a startup/ shutdown plan to make sure you’re using only the equipment that you need, when you need it. The savings can be substantial.

2. Cook wisely. Ovens tend to be more efficient than rotisseries; griddles tend to be more efficient than broilers. Review your menu and cooking methods to find ways to rely on your more efficient pieces of restaurant equipment.

3. Maintain and repair. Everyday wear and tear can quickly drive up your energy bills. A leaky gasket, clogged burner or loose oven-door hinge may not waste much energy on their own, but combine all three together and suddenly the waste is significant. Stop waste by staying on top of repairs.

4. Recalibrate to stay efficient. Over time and use the performance of your restaurant equipment will degrade. Thermostats and control systems can fail or fall out of calibration. Take the time to do an occasional thermostat check and recalibrate as necessary to ensure that you’re cooking at the right temperature. Repair or replace broken control panels on ovens, steamers, and other pieces of restaurant equipment that feature control systems.

5. Check pilot lights. Older gas-burning restaurant equipment typically feature pilot lights, which require a constant stream of gas to stay lit. Check pilot flames occasionally to make sure you’re using only as much gas as you need. A quick visual inspection is enough to tell if your pilot lights are over-fired. An over-fired pilot will have a tall yellow flame instead of a blue bullet shaped flame. If you do find that you’re pilot light is over-fired, you’ll want to adjust the pilot light back to a blue bullet shaped flame.

6. Buy energy-efficient restaurant equipment. Inefficient appliances increase your energy expenses in two different ways by having higher operating costs along generating more heat. This additional heat generated by an inefficient appliance forces the air-conditioning system of a restaurant work harder to maintain proper air temperature.

7. Buy with capacity in mind. Evaluate your food production needs and try to buy restaurant equipment that matches your needs on a pounds-per-hour basis. Oversized appliances can quickly cut a restaurant’s profits via higher capital costs as well as increased operating costs. An oversized appliance may be energy efficient but still cost additional money as you are basically paying to heat up the extra production capacity of the unit that you’ll never use.

Want to learn more about how Serv-U can help make your restaurant more energy-efficient? Be sure to visit the Energy Star section of our website or feel free to contact us via phone at 800-797-3788 or click the picture of the customer service representative at the top left corner of each page of the site to launch a live chat.

Whether you’re redesigning your current bar set-up or building a completely new one, there are several items that need to be considered when laying out your bar equipment and bar supplies to improve the efficiency of your bartenders.

Sometimes it is easy to forget that the object of a bar design is not just to serve as a centerpiece for the bar but to allow the bartender quick and efficient access to the bar equipment and bar supplies that they will need to serve the customer in a timely fashion. A bar with poorly laid out bar equipment and bar supplies can have a huge negative impact on customer service which can ultimately lead to the failure of the business.

The first step is to determine what pieces of bar equipment and bar supplies need grouped together. Generally if the bartender has to take three or four steps to get anything he needs for one drink then there may be design issues negatively effecting the bar design. Common items that bartenders need access to on a regular basis can include; glassware, ice well, back bar cooler, beer taps, soft-drink gun, cocktail equipment, and the speed rail would be included in this list.

Once you have determined which pieces of bar equipment and bar supplies need grouped together it becomes an exercise in laying out the bar equipment and bar supplies in a manner that best utilizes the space behind the bar and doesn’t clutter up the bar counter. The back bar, that area located outside of customer view, should hold commonly restocked items such as bottled beer, liquors and spirits as well as those liquors and spirits that a bartender rarely uses so that they don’t take up his premium space. An exception to this rule would be top shelf premium liquors and spirits that rarely get used but give the bar area that conversation piece and image of class.

Serv-u offers a design-a-bar service that stands ready to help you design your bar area. Simply call Serv-U and a member of our qualified sales staff will be happy to assist you in determining what underbar bar equipment will help you achieve an efficient work area for your bartenders in the space you have available. Once our sales staff has determined what underbar bar equipment you need, Serv-U will then provide you with a full AutoCAD layout of the specified bar equipment and quotation at no charge.

Proper care and maintenance of your bar equipment is an important part of any bar area, be it in a restaurant, free standing pub, or hotel. Today we’ll cover helpful tips on making your bar equipment maintenance simple and easy. So why should you keep your bar equipment clean? The main reason is to keep on-tap beers tasting their best and pouring smoothly. Beer lines, line other bar equipment, can build up sediment the longer they are in use. In addition to causing your bar equipment to become contaminated, it will also increase foaming in your beer.

Depending on the line length on your bar equipment the process of flushing your beer lines can be a time consuming but important process, but with the right selection of bar supplies the task becomes a snap. Choose a good beer line cleaner that is non-abrasive when flushing your bar equipment. While non-abrasive is pretty much standard it is still good to double check. Abrasive cleaners can scratch the inside of your beer lines causing your beer to become increasingly foamy as it passes over the scratches and nicks.

Once the process of flushing your beer lines with beer line cleaner has been completed, it is time to sanitize your beer lines. The beer line cleaner will flush out the sediment from your beer lines and the sanitizer is the process that will kill all the bacteria inside your bar equipment, so both steps are needed to maintain maximum beer taste in your bar equipment. It is also recommended that once you have completed the sanitizer process that the entire system is flushed again with clean water. This final flushing of the system with water will help remove any lingering sanitizer that could taint the taste of the beer.

There is more to maintenance of your bar equipment than just the beer lines however. It is equally important to keep outside of your bar equipment in top shape. Generally, it is a good idea to clean the keg tap and beer faucet on the same schedule as the cleaning of the beer line since that piece of bar equipment will be out of service for the duration of its cleaning anyway. The keg tap and beer faucet are perhaps the easiest places for contamination and bacteria to enter your bar equipment but with regular cleaning the chances of contamination from these two pieces of bar equipment is drastically reduced. Unlike the beer faucet and keg tap, the spill tray requires much more attention. Empty the spill tray as needed during bar operation and make sure to give it a thorough cleaning at night when wiping down the rest of the bar equipment.

If you have questions on which bar supplies are right for cleaning your bar equipment, feel free to contact us via phone at 800-797-3788 or click the picture of the customer service representative at the top left corner of each page of the site to launch a live chat.

Test tube shooters, powerbomb cups, and flavored rimming salts; what more could the creative bartender ask for?  As I’ve noted here before, specialty drinks are increasingly popular, and their presentation makes a difference in your patrons' experiences. 

The novelty of taking a shot from a test tube isn’t quickly forgotten and it’s even more memorable if a group of friends shares a test tube rack together.  And the Jager bomb remains a favorite.  Rather than drop a shot glass into a tumbler, why not combine the two as a plastic shot glass within a tumbler?  It’s safer, easier, affordable, and unique.

So make an impression!  Get your bar supply needs taken care of here at Serv-U.