Cycle Pub to Self-Serve Taps: Walking the Line Between Awesome and Gimmicky

More than any other alcoholic beverage – perhaps more than any beverage, in general – beer seems to inspire people to have fun. Not just the kind of fun where you fall off the back of your pick up truck laughing before the game. I’m talking about quirky, inspired ideas from the people who make the beer. For instance, take a recent stroke of Easter inspiration at the 21st Amendment Brewery Pub: they hid cans of beer around the bar and patrons got to have their own adult Easter egg-style hunt. Or a limited edition winter brew created by Deschutes Brewery—they named it Giraffe on Ice Skates.

One contraption that gained some press when it was first introduced in Bend was the Cycle Pub, sponsored by the Old Mill District. The cycle pub seats 16 people at a “bar” and they pedal around Bend while drinking beer.

Perhaps beer inspires fun ideas because of the kind of people drawn to creating craft beer in the first place. Plus, the people who write and blog about beer love their job – they’re quick to report on any new innovation or development. From a PR point of view, that means quirky ideas are sure to bring in some good press.

But when does an idea cross the line into the realm of a gimmick? Pretty simple: when customers find it annoying rather than amusing. Recently I was chatting with Chris Shott, writer at the Washington City Paper in D.C. and he brought up self-serve taps. Three bars around D.C. installed taps at each booth so customers could pour their own beer. My initial thought was, “that sounds like fun.”

But Shott had a much different experience. He wrote, “In the end, despite all this fuzzy math, Redline still charged me the original 55-cent rate. Crunching the numbers, it now appears that sitting on my ass and pouring my own suds cost me about $6.60 per glass. That’s 60 cents extra! One whole ounce of suds and change.”

Perhaps since the time Shott wrote about self-serve taps in December, the D.C. pubs have worked out the kinks and pricing so patrons can enjoy their self-serve beer. Whatever innovative idea a pub – or any business – embraces to encourage patrons to have fun with their product, it has to be user-friendly; and it should fit into the company’s overall vision and brand.

So what about those other beer ideas—21st Amendment’s Easter Beer Hunt, or the Cycle Pub? Well, I doubt we’ll see many Cycle Pubs crawling slowly through Portland any time soon, but what I love about this bar-cum-bike is it’s so purely “Oregon.” What could be more Oregon than drinking and cycling at the same time?

Just make sure I’m not the one steering the dang thing.