Hey, Rick Uzubell again from Cabaret Design Group,
answering the question,
"How Do You Re-Design A Commercial bar?"
What equipment should be included in a
commercial bar design? Discover the need for glass storage and how to design
draft beer towers in an island back bar.
Moving on to the final phase of the bar design, I've completed our final bar
equipment plan and instead of showing you all the steps along the way, just
know that this is very time-consuming, includes many iterations and would be
pointless to take you through every one of them. The underbar equipment plan
shown here gives us our best, most efficient layout. In summary, we have a
3-station bar: the walk-up bar and a bartender station at each end.
Also note the wait staff pick-up station at the right end. Each bartender has a
POS station built into the bar and the walk-up bar has a POS station built into
the island back bar, which was the only area available. Please refer to my
earlier Vlog post that discusses how POS stations in the bar front are essential
to ergonomic bar design. The new bar design has a total of two rack-style
glass washers: one at the left end of the bar
and the other at the right. These are Moyer Diebel MD240LT units, which are
great for a high-production bar (see the downloadable cut sheet).
Any bar desiring a high-level of productivity would certainly love this
equipment. The new bar also features an abundance of underbar glass storage, some
in the back bar island as shown in these two elevations -- here and here, and at
the right end, here. Folks, I can hardly begin
to emphasize the need for plentiful glass storage.
Besides the overall physical layout of the bar design, the focus of this project
was to feature draught beer front-and-center. As I mentioned
in Part 1 of the series, the Owner has an existing Micro Matic glycol draft beer
system. The power pack, shown over here, has two pumps and was initially
designed for future growth.
Each pump has the capacity to serve one trunk line,
which is one tower, which dispenses eight beer products.
Our goal was to add two additional draft beer towers, but at the surface this
would appear to leave us needing one additional trunk line. So how can this be
accomplished? This certainly adds a bit to the mystery. This is where the value of a
really good installer surfaces. At this point, we need to discuss another piece
of equipment that was instrumental in the success of the draft beer
installation. In the island back bar we have a self-contained back bar cooler,
shown right here, a Perlick model DDS84, as shown in this photo.
Although this isn't connected to the glycol system, it ends-up becoming the
missing mechanical element to the solution. In some earlier Vlogs
I discussed long-draw and direct-draw draft beer systems. The Perlick beer
cooler becomes an air-cooled long-draw draft beer system -- sort of! Through some
mechanical engineering manipulation, we were able to make the third draft beer
tower operate as part of the Micro Matic glycol system; how this was exactly
accomplished will be covered as a subject of another Vlog. Incidentally, if
you haven't yet noticed, the draft beer towers were installed on only one side
of the island back bar -- shown here, which was done as a request of the Owner. The
back bar is capable of accommodating a duplicate set of towers on the opposite
side, should the need arise. Also included as part of this bar design project are
the following: a bar equipment schedule, numerous details, including section views
and elevations, as shown here, and here and here. The island back bar
cabinet plan, shown here, a bar framing plan and a bar top plan. In other words,
we provided all the construction documents required to carry out the
construction of the bar, including all related equipment. We accomplished all of
our objectives, which includes a new user-friendly multi-sided bar, designed
to accommodate individuals and groups of all sizes, and a front-and-center 24-faucet
glycol draft beer system. A special thanks to Stuever & Sons, the Micro Matic
installer -- they were real pros and a pleasure to work with!