foot Heartland Brewery & Rotisserie
venue housed in the Empire State Building, the most salient example of Bloostein’s total emersion strategy for guest
satisfaction may be the brewpub chain’s
12,000-square-foot brewery in Clinton
Hill, Brooklyn.
Remote Brewing
While the logistics of supplying the six
existing Heartland Brewery locales via the
Brooklyn brewery are more complicated
and less sexy than the old way of brewing
the beer on-premise at each individual
location, the move goes to the core of
product integrity while bowing to the reali-ties of the New York City marketplace,
Bloostein says.
“For quality control, we decided to
consolidate brewing operations,” Bloostein says. “With a brewer in each store,
the beer was turning out a little different
from location to location.”
Just as critical in weighing the decision, however, was the cost of rent in
Manhattan.
“You cannot pay New York City retail
rates and manufacture there. You will go
out of business. As a result, we have a
much better product today.”
Through the use of BevNet computer
technology, Bloostein says Heartland
beverage managers go online and determine from past sales records how much
beer they will need for a given week. A
full-time staff driver then delivers the kegs
— no easy task in Manhattan.
“On any given day, my driver is delivering 150 kegs weighing 130 pounds each,
so he has his work cut out for him,”
Bloostein explains. “At the Empire State
Building, the loading dock is two blocks
away from the restaurant.”
The same BevNet technology also is
put to use in tracking inventory and preventing waste and shrinkage, he says.
“The system reconciles the ounces
we are supposed to have sold with
the actual number of ounces that were
poured. If there is a variance of 2 percent, that’s okay, but if it reaches 15 percent, we have a troubleshooting protocol
we go through.”
Additionally, Bloostein and his brewpub
managers insist on a half-inch head for
each beer poured.
“It does not always happen, but that is
our standard,” he notes. “The reason is
The Radio City Heartland location features two
private party rooms for guests to entertain.
to control portions and provide the most
pleasing beer we can serve to customers. We tell our servers that if they waste
10 percent of our product, that creates
six more weeks of work for our brewing
operation each year.”
At Heartland, Bloostein goes so far as
to require servers and hostesses to earn
the right to speak to guests by undertaking comprehensive beer training.
” We have a beer test called Beer 101
that we give to everyone who comes in
contact with a guest, and unless you get
a 90 on the exam, you have to go back
and study harder before you are allowed
to make contact with a customer,”
Bloostein explains.
Well-publicized increases in the price
of brewing ingredients such as yeast,
malt and hops recently forced Bloostein
to raise the $6.95 price of a pint of beer
at Heartland by approximately 45 cents
per glass. It is not a decision that the
self-described beer geek, who learned
about microbrews and craft beer through
visits to cities such as San Francisco in
the 1980s and early ’90s, takes lightly.
Yet thus far, he says, such last-resort
price spikes are being mitigated, if not
offset, by a value-added philosophy that
provides everyone who walks in the door
with liberal numbers of 3-ounce beer tasters at no charge.
“I could lower the price and take the
tasters away,” Bloostein points out, “but
that would be inconsistent with what we
are trying to accomplish, which is to share
our beer, educate our customers and
keep beer fun.” NCB
