Small Brewery Business Ideas?

[GlacierBrewing]

Howdy all,
This goes out to all the small (15bbl, 10bbl, 7bbl, and less) breweries out there with public tasting rooms located in seasonal locations.

Where we are located in Montana, the population swings from a summertime high of around 15,000 to a non-warm-months low of around 3,800. We are always working on getting more people through the door.
What have you found to be some of the more successful (and maybe offbeat) ways to get more customers into your tasting room?

Prost!
Dave

[Ted Briggs]

Mug Club keeps the locals interested-
Special events, especially with music have a good turnout.
Charity events work well too.
(We only get 15k here in Lander for one day- the 4th of July. I think 24 suspension of open container law and the fireworks law help. Basically WW3 with beer! )

[liammckenna]

Tuesday night Trivia.

Busiest night of the week in the depths of winter. Crazy busy.

Pax.

Liam

[MickDuffs]

We also do a Tuesday night trivia. We have been packing our small pub with trivia players every Tuesday for almost 6 years. Our trivia night consists of 7 rounds of 5 questions shown on a power point presentation via a laptop and projector. We even have a loud speaker to play sound questions. Our place starts to get busy with trivia players sometimes as early as 3:00 (trivia starts at 7:00 and ends around 9:00). A lot of time and effort goes into trivia, but it’s totally worth it.

Mickey Mahoney

MickDuff's Brewing Co.

[Brewtopian]

This doesn't help a lot with your in pub sales but it could help with over all exposure. We're going to be bringing our beer festival to Missoula this coming July 4th weekend and we'd love to have you be a part of the event. It will be held behind the Big Sky Brewery.

We're going to be doing events like this across the country to help benefit the local craft beer community. For example, we're doing a beer festival in Twin Falls, ID this year to benefit a local home brewer who wants to launch his own commercial brewery. We'd like to pick one person each year that we can can hold a festival on behalf of so we can help grow the number of breweries in the country.

[abqj33]

Beer & Cheese pairings

Events at restaurants in towns close by, help advertise your place while costing less- you are only "donating" a keg or 2.