How Often to Update Your Tap List: The 4 Triggers

Update your tap list every time a line on it stops being true. In practice that means 4 triggers: a keg kicks, a new keg goes on, a price or pour size changes, and the check before doors open, with a short closing check at the end of each shift. This post covers each trigger, why a weekly schedule leaves the board wrong for half the week, how to estimate how often your own triggers fire, and what goes into the two daily checks.

What are the 4 moments that call for an update?

The 4 moments are a kicked keg, a newly tapped keg, a price or pour change, and the pre-open check. Tie the update to those and nobody has to remember a schedule. If none of them happen on a Tuesday, nobody touches the board that Tuesday. If six happen on a Saturday, it changes six times.

Which smaller changes count too?

Corrections, on deck changes and specials also count. Fix a wrong ABV, a typo in a beer name, or a style that doesn't match what's in the glass as soon as you spot it. Change the on deck section the day you learn a listed beer isn't coming; the guide to wording an on deck tap list covers what to say. When a special starts or ends, the board changes with it, as the post on happy hour specials without price fights explains.

Why doesn't a weekly update schedule keep the board right?

A weekly schedule fails because kegs kick when they're empty, and that depends on the weather, the crowd, whether a game is on, and which beer the bartender has been recommending all night. None of those follow your calendar.

Here is a worked example with made-up hours. The inputs:

• The bar is open 4 pm to midnight, 7 days a week: 8 hours a day, 56 open hours a week.
• The board gets its weekly update Monday at 3 pm, before open.
• A keg kicks Thursday at 8 pm, and the replacement goes on at 8:15.

The line is wrong from 8:15 pm Thursday until Monday's update. That's about 4 hours on Thursday plus 8 hours each on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, for about 28 open hours. Half the week's 56 open hours run with a line that doesn't match the handle, and those hours include Friday and Saturday night.

Every guest who orders off that line hears that the beer is gone, walks back to the board and picks again. To put a dollar figure on those misses, the outdated menu incident log shows how to count them one at a time.

How often will the kick trigger fire at my bar?

The kick trigger fires about once for every keg's worth of pours you sell, so keg size sets the pace. Under the federal beer regulations, a barrel is 31 US gallons (27 CFR 25.11, as published by Cornell's Legal Information Institute), and the same rules list halves, quarters and sixths among the authorized fractions of a barrel (27 CFR 25.156, Legal Information Institute). The National Institute of Standards and Technology puts 128 fluid ounces in a gallon and 16 in a pint (NIST Handbook 44, Appendix C).

Those 3 facts give the full keg numbers below, rounded down to whole pours:

Treat these as ceilings. Foam, line flushes and the last sputtering pull leave every keg short of its full count, so your real number will be lower.

Now a worked example with a made-up volume. A 12 tap taproom pours 600 beers a week, all 16 oz:

• On sixth barrels: 600 / 41 = about 15 kicks a week. Most kicks also mean a new keg goes on, so that's about 30 board changes a week from kegs alone.
• On half barrels: 600 / 124 = about 5 kicks a week, or about 10 board changes.

The same sales on smaller kegs triple the work on the board. If your wall runs mostly sixths, build your routine around the kick trigger first. The post on keg levels on the board covers how to flag a line before it gets that far.

How do I make the board change part of the keg swap?

Write a house rule that ties the board change to the physical change, so it gets done during the rush and never waits on a list of things to do later. Staff in a rush follow a rule they can say in one breath. For example:

• "No new keg pours until its line is up."
• "A new price goes up when its keg is tapped, never before."
• "A special comes off the board when it ends, not at close."

Word yours however you like, and make the person who swaps the keg the owner of its line. That one rule also makes the routine for a keg that kicks mid-shift shorter, because the board change is already part of the swap.

What goes into the pre-open check?

The pre-open check is one person walking the rail with the board in view, matching every handle to its line before the first guest walks in. It's the one trigger tied to the clock, because overnight is when things drift. A keg got swapped at close and the board didn't, last night's special is still up, or a price changed with a new invoice.

• Match each handle to its line: brewery, beer name, style, ABV and price.
• Check any tap that was swapped yesterday twice.
• Compare prices to your price list, especially for any keg that came in on a new invoice. The guide to draft beer cost per ounce shows how to build the sheet you compare against.
• Take down anything left from yesterday: specials, "last call" notes and event lines.
• Confirm the on deck section is still true.
• Look at every screen or board you run. A list that's right at the bar can still be wrong on a second board across the room.
• Check any keg flagged as running low.

Give the check to someone who knows the lineup well, and on a big wall, start it earlier so nobody rushes it.

What goes into the closing check?

The closing check is a last walk of the handles against the board while the person who knows what happened tonight is still in the building. It catches whatever the 4 triggers missed during service.

• For anything that kicked and got swapped tonight, confirm the new line is right in every field.
• For anything that kicked and wasn't replaced, confirm it's off the board or clearly marked.
• Pull any special that ended.
• Put any keg low enough to kick early tomorrow on the shift handoff card.

Fix whatever turns up before lights out, so the opener's check doesn't start with last night's cleanup.

How do the triggers change by type of venue?

The triggers are the same everywhere. What changes from room to room is which one fires most often.

Brewery taproom pouring its own beer

Kicks are fewer and easier to predict, because you know what's in the cold room. New releases and price changes are the big triggers. Keep the pre-open check daily anyway, since a wrong board on release day hurts the most.

Beer bar or beer hall with 30 or more taps

On a busy weekend the kick trigger can fire several times a night, and "no new keg pours until its line is up" does the most work here. A weekly redo on a wall that size is behind by Friday.

Growler fill station or bottle shop with a tap wall

The board doubles as the to-go price list, so the price trigger matters more. When a keg comes in at a new cost and the fill price changes, the board changes before the first fill at the new price.

How do I count my own triggers for a week?

Keep a tally sheet by the board for one week and make a mark each time a trigger fires:

At the end of the week, look at two numbers. The total is how many times your board needed to change, which is rarely the same as how many times it did. The busiest day shows where the house rule matters most: if most marks land on Friday and Saturday, those are the shifts where the board change has to ride along with the keg swap.

Then check the kick row against the keg math above. If you poured about 600 beers from sixth barrels and marked only 8 kicks, some kicks went unrecorded, and the board probably missed them too.

How does a digital board handle the triggers?

A digital board turns each trigger into an edit from a phone, a tablet or a computer behind the bar. On the TapDisplay board, each connected screen checks for changes every 30 seconds, so an edit shows on every screen carrying that line within about 30 seconds.

• A kicked beer stays on the board, struck through. Your business type sets the label: KICKED on keg menus such as a brewery or bar, SOLD OUT on other menus such as coffee or wine.
• Start typing a beer name and pick a match from the catalog, and it fills in the brewery, style and ABV you haven't entered yet. That shortens the new keg trigger.
• You enter keg levels by hand, so the low kegs you flag on the closing check can show on the board too.
• Owner, manager and staff roles let the person who swaps the keg change the line. An activity log shows who changed what, with undo, so the pre-open check can start with last night's changes before anyone walks the rail.

Someone still has to make each change, so the house rules and both daily checks apply on a digital board too.

The bottom line

Update the tap list when something on it stops being true: a kick, a new keg, a price or pour change, and the check before doors open. Close each shift with one more walk of the handles. Keg size sets how often the kick trigger fires, so count one week of triggers before deciding how much of each shift the board needs.