SELF-SERVE

Meeting Notes

F&B 10 SIGNATURE DRINK 12 NEW VENUE SPOTLIGHT 13 IT’S YOUR BIZ 14

BYO BARTENDER

In-hotel wine, beer and cocktail taps are bringing the bar right to your room.

The hotel bar is a fun, convenient option to unwind after a long day of meetings, but with companies like Plum Wine and PourMyBeer, hotels are now taking it one step further: They’re bringing the bar to your room. That’s right—throw on that plush robe and slippers because you no longer need to leave the room to get a drink.

Plum Wine

Since opening its first in-room taps in 2018 at the Four Seasons in Silicon Valley, Plum Wine has been bringing wine, beer and spirits to guests’ rooms in 22 hotels across the United States. The Plum amenity houses up to two bottles of wine that can be preserved for up to 90 days using argon gas. “Similar to a Nespresso machine, when a guest wants a glass of wine or spirit in the convenience of their hotel room, they just press a button,” says founder David Koretz.

Koretz says meetings and events planners can customize Plum to their attendees’ liking by offering a unique experience to sample many local wines and pair them with the hotel’s menu. “It’s all about exceeding guest expectations. Guests today aren’t just looking for a bed to sleep in; rather, they crave an experience that allows them to indulge and feel catered to. They crave an experience that exceeds what they can get at home,” Koretz says.

A Plum canister, which serves more than 1,000 pours, uses cloud and artificial intelligence to identify the label of a bottle of wine, beer or spirit, and it automatically sets the perfect temperature for each bottle.

PourMyBeer

With self-pour taps in hotel lobbies across the United States and Canada, PourMyBeer offers guests the opportunity the pour their own wine, beer, kombucha or cold brew and bring it back to their rooms.

“Guests can use their room key to get a beverage of their choice any time they want and pour it by the ounce. For example, some hotels can have bars only open for a few hours a day, limiting their beverage sales. This is not an issue with self-pour technology, which allows the guest to access the beverages around the clock,” says Tana Rulkova, marketing manager.

PourMyBeer allows guests to access only two drinks at a time, but if a guest requests more, hotel staff can give their keycard access to two more.

Though PourMyBeer has the capability to install a tap in each individual guest room, Rulkova says it is more cost efficient and lower maintenance for hotels to serve these kegged beverages in a tap located in the lobby for all guests to use.

“We want to offer an easy-to-deploy mobile dispense solution to hotels that they can activate for events or just everyday use in the lobby,” Rulkova says. —Kassidy Tarala

Get Connected

PLUM WINE | plum.wine POURMYBEER | pourmybeer.com