So, you want to get more people into your taproom, drinking your beer. But how?
Hosting a brewery trivia night (or nights) is an easy and fun way to get your patrons involved and spending more time at your brewery. From date night to game night, people enjoy getting out and socializing. Playing games is a popular social activity, and casual semi-competitive events always draw a crowd. Ultimately, people want to socialize with old and new friends alike in a fun environment – and, ideally, drink good beer!
Why Host a Brewery Trivia Night?
It’s no surprise that people love trivia night. It’s an exciting way to casually compete with friends in a fun environment. Often, groups of friends will form a team and show up weekly to a well-organized bar trivia night.
Bar trivia night is a reliable way for bar and brewery owners to attract more business on slower nights—especially during the week. And while brewery taprooms have become a popular choice for patrons, they aren’t immune from the notorious weeknight slowdown.
Which is precisely why you should consider hosting a brewery trivia night! People love trivia, and people love beer. Even though weeknights can be slow, a fun, team-based social event is often all the incentive needed to encourage folks to swing by their favorite venue after work, after a league night game, or simply to get out of the house.
And let’s face it, your brewery taproom is way cooler than that other place down the road serving those “just alright hot wings and discounted domestic lagers.” Craft breweries like yours serve an important function beyond selling beer; your taproom is critical to building healthy bonds within and across the local community.
By hosting a brewery trivia night (and other brewery games), your brewery can provide great weekly events that give people a wide variety of topics to spark conversation, casual competition, and a fun way to spend an evening.
In addition to being a valuable community activity, trivia nights benefit your brewery’s bottom line! The time patrons spend during trivia brings in more money spent on food and drinks while attracting new customers through word of mouth. The positive energy generated also encourages patrons to spend more on drinks, food, and merchandise by helping them to relax and show off their trivia skills.
Wondering how to host a trivia night at a bar? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered with lots of tips and info.
Doing It Right — Promoting Your Brewery Trivia Night(s)
Now that you’ve decided to host a brewery trivia night, let’s talk about the next step: promoting your trivia events.
Whether you’re just getting started or have hosted brewery trivia nights for a while, never underestimate the power word of mouth has within your local community. Placing flyers and posters in strategic locations around your taproom helps create awareness about your upcoming trivia nights. If you’re partnering with other local businesses, be sure to provide these partners with flyers and posters that they can display at their locations.
Posting and updating a list of upcoming events on your brewery website and social media profile home pages is another great way to inform your online visitors and social followers. Inform your serving and bartending staff that brewery trivia night will benefit their tips and sales and encourage them to help promote your trivia night when they talk about weekly specials.
Think about offering a special menu dedicated to your brewery trivia night with trivia-themed features, participating team, or happy hour-style discounts. As a brewery, you could even brew a specialty beer made just for trivia night!
If your taproom doesn’t have a kitchen, coordinate with local food trucks and nearby restaurants. Making sure that food is readily available to accompany your trivia night will help encourage your patrons to stay longer, spend more money, and not feel the need to leave for food. When you partner with food trucks and local restaurants, your brewery trivia nights will help grow their business while they help you promote your event.
If you’re thinking about spending money on advertising, keep in mind that advertising takes thoughtful execution, coordination with other potential local partnerships, and requires repeated effort in an ongoing campaign.
However you decide to promote and advertise your brewery trivia night, be sure to include the following information:
- Trivia theme (if any)
- Date, time, location
- Prizes available (like brewery branded merchandise like T-Shirts, hats, glassware, bottle openers)
- Website URL
A note about prizes: don’t cheap out! Digital trivia host experts Buzztime Business offers this advice: trivia players expect great prizes. A single $10 gift card will not go over well with a team of players. Instead of being cheap, be creative. Leverage partnerships with other local businesses for great prizes, offer a $50 bar tab to the winning team, free burgers from a food truck, or free tap beer and a giant platter of nachos. Put a team photo on the wall and make a permanent display to honor many-time winners.
Another important note is to establish a few rules ahead of time. Despite the casual nature of a brewery trivia night, people still want a fair competition and they want to understand how trivia works. A few of the most common trivia rules include:
- No phones.
- Size limit of teams.
- Point values each answer is worth.
Unless you’re running themed nights (like classic movies), trivia questions should cover every aspect of knowledge, from “Who and what is Spongebob Squarepants’ pet?” to “What’s the first line of Yesterday by The Beatles?” to “What’s the nearest planet to the sun?” By including topics from different eras and areas of knowledge, your quiz is fair to everyone in the room.
Are Partnerships Worth It?
Yes! Beyond the reasons we’ve already mentioned, partnering with other local businesses is an excellent way to help boost profits for everyone involved and increase foot traffic and local awareness. Ultimately, it helps to build a more positive community.
Like all local businesses, your brewery depends on customers, clients, and their patronage. Brewery taprooms are a popular and important local community gathering place. Hosting a brewery trivia night will draw a crowd. At the same time, partnerships with other local businesses help generate community awareness and enthusiasm for your brand, your beer and your brewery trivia night!
Your community partners can also provide inspiration for trivia themes. Partner with and/or sponsor a local sports league, and your taproom is sure to be a destination after games. Connecting with local movie theaters can provide your trivia nights with great prizes and fun themes related to film and TV.
Another thing to consider: it’s more common today for movie theaters to sell alcoholic beverages… is your brewery featured on their tap line? A partnership could just seal the deal!
Not sure where to start? Consider partnering with:
- Charities and non-profits. People love donating to a good cause, especially when they get to have fun doing it!
- Local game shops. Geek-themed events make for great trivia themes and can attract a wide and varied crowd. Board and card games and other merchandise can be exciting and fun prizes.
- Food trucks and local restaurants. These partnerships mutually benefit your brewery and their restaurants. It also offers an easy solution for gift cards and provides variety for your patrons—no kitchen required. You could even take it one step further and create fun beer and food pairings.
- Local and professional sports leagues. Whether your city/town has a professional team or not, there are local non-professional teams and events. Consider sponsoring a local team(s) and host a sports-themed brewery trivia night. If there are pro teams, contact their community partner programs. Tickets to professional game events make great prizes.
- Cinema & TV. Community tv show trivia and cinema themes are always fun trivia themes. Prizes such as movie theater gift cards, and TV subscription service gift cards are highly desirable rewards.
- Local museums, libraries, and historical societies/events. History trivia themes are always popular, and partnerships here promote the arts and education.
The possibilities are endless. Partnering with other local businesses helps promote both brands, encourage community interest, and offer a variety of prizes, which helps to keep drawing a crowd for your bar trivia night!
Professional or DIY Trivia Night?
Alright, so you’ve decided you’re going to host a trivia night… but what does hosting a trivia night take? Do you hire an outside company to MC the event, or do you do it all in-house? If you hire someone to host your brewery trivia night, how much should you pay? What if it’s not a company, but a solo MC? How reliable are they? On the other hand, how do you host a trivia night without an outside company? Who’s going to MC the event? Where do you get your trivia questions and are they even accurate?
Make no mistake, it takes work to ensure that trivia night is fun, easy-going, and successful. People love it for precisely those reasons. Let’s look at a few things to consider:
Pros & Cons: Professional vs. DIY Trivia Host
- Cost. Hiring a bar trivia night host makes things easier for you because they do all the event work while you provide the location venue and keep the beer flowing. However, they can be costly. Doing it all in-house seems a lot cheaper, but it’s even more work, time, and energy on your side.
- Dedicated MC. Going pro makes a lot of sense here. A great MC can be the difference between a popular, well-attended brewery trivia night, or a total flop. Not to mention, the MC is responsible for trivia questions and making sure they have the right answers. But maybe you have a charismatic server or bartender that loves to put on a show. You could potentially save a lot by hiring your own staff to MC for the night. So long as they’re reliable and dedicated, this could be a great solution.
- Trivia questions. The big question here is, how long do you want to spend fact-checking your trivia answers? When you hire a professional, the work is already done for you. As long as they are a reputable trivia service, you won’t have to worry about the details. Setup becomes far more difficult if you’re going to do everything in-house. It takes a lot of work, time, and energy to find good questions, accurate answers, and balancing the obscure with the obvious.
You might be thinking, “there must be an alternative to professional or DIY, right? We are living in the digital age, aren’t we?”
And you’re right—there is a solution. Companies like Buzztime Business have emerged to make the answer to how to host a trivia night even easier. They provide technology solutions that take away all of the guesswork when it comes to trivia questions. All you need to do is provide the MC and they take care of the rest with digital tablets that each participant/team uses for selecting answers, scoring, etc.
Give Useless Knowledge the Home it Deserves with Brewery Trivia Night
Trivia night is among the most popular bar and brewery games because it nails the things most everyone loves—social engagement, inclusivity, competition, teamwork, fun, and a chance to show off useless knowledge!
Themed trivia nights can bring in different groups of people and help keep your brewery taproom busy, even on those dreaded slow nights.
Partnering with other local businesses can help grow the local community by spreading brand awareness while offering an opportunity to increase profits for your brewery and your partners.
Now that you’re caught up on how to host a trivia night at a bar, what’s stopping you? Don’t miss out on more craft beer and brewery news and tips on the RWS blog.
Featured image and post images licensed via Pxhere and Pixabay
