Is Pourwall really free?

Yes, for one screen. The Basic plan costs nothing and includes a digital draft menu with unlimited taps and single-TV casting, with no advertisements. Premium runs $30 per month per location, or $290 per year, and adds unlimited screens, QR code menus, printed menus and a website embed. Those figures were verified on Pourwall's own site in September 2026.

Should I use Pourwall or Brewlytics for my tap list?

If a screen showing what's pouring is the whole job, use Pourwall. It is free for a single screen, it runs on hardware you can buy for $30, and paying a platform price for a menu you could get for nothing makes no sense. Choose Brewlytics when you want the menu to be one surface of a system that also knows which customers drink what.

What hardware does Pourwall need?

It runs on FireTV, Chromecast, Google TV and Android TV devices, so an inexpensive streaming stick plus a TV you already own is enough. Brewlytics displays work the same way — you point a streaming device's browser at your display link — so hardware is not a meaningful difference between them.

Can Pourwall print menus?

Yes, on the Premium tier, alongside QR menus and a website embed. That makes it one of the few menu tools covering both screen and paper. Brewlytics also does both, generating letter-size print-ready PDFs from the same live tap list.

What can't a standalone menu tool do?

It cannot tell you who is drinking what. A menu tool reads your beer list; it never sees the transaction, so it has no way to know that a particular regular has bought the hazy IPA four times. That is the layer taste-segmented alerts, loyalty and recommendations are built on, and it comes from POS data rather than from the menu.

Do I have to give up my menu tool to use Brewlytics?

No. Plenty of breweries run a menu tool they already like and use Brewlytics for the customer side. The menus are included rather than required — if Pourwall is working on your wall, keep it.

Choose Brewery Software Use POS Data Digital Menus & Displays Customer Taste Profiles

Pourwall vs Brewlytics: A Free Beer Menu, or the Data Behind It

By Brian Winckel · Founder, Brewlytics.ai

Operator8 min readSeptember 11, 2026Outcome: Know whether you need a menu tool or a customer platform, and stop paying for the wrong one

A brewery owner's hands on a dark bar top at opening time, one holding a small streaming stick just out of its plain cardboard box beside a coiled HDMI cable and a marked-up paper tap list, with a switched-off TV above the back bar far out of focus behind.

Short Answer

Pourwall is a free digital beer menu that runs on a cheap streaming stick, with a $30/month Premium tier adding unlimited screens, QR and print. Brewlytics is a brewery customer platform that also draws menus. If a screen showing your tap list is the entire job, Pourwall is the better and cheaper answer. Brewlytics earns its price only when you want the menu to sit on top of customer data — taste profiles built from POS history that drive segmented alerts, loyalty and recommendations.

Barley's Take

I'm supposed to tell you the paid thing wins. It doesn't, not at the job Pourwall does — a free menu on a $30 stick is hard to argue with. Ask a different question: once the screen is up, does anything know who's standing in front of it?

Why This Matters for Breweries

Somewhere between opening your taproom and reading this, a beer went off tap and a screen kept advertising it.

That is the whole problem a digital menu solves, and it is a real one. A chalkboard is charming until the third time a bartender explains that the sign is wrong. So you go looking for digital menu software, and you find a crowded field where nearly every option looks the same in a search result — and one of them is free.

The confusing part is that Pourwall and Brewlytics both show up in that search, and they are not the same kind of product at all. One is a menu. The other is a customer platform that happens to draw menus. Buying the wrong one costs you either money you didn't need to spend, or a capability you assumed you were getting.

This is an honest read of which is which, written by the people who make one of them.

How It Works: What Each One Actually Is

Pourwall is a digital beverage menu service for bars, breweries, restaurants and tap houses. You manage your tap list from a phone, tablet or computer, and it displays on TVs through FireTV, Chromecast, Google TV or Android TV.

An overhead flat-lay on a dark wood bar: a streaming stick, HDMI cable and printed tap list on the left, and on the right a tablet showing abstract cards, a small bar chart and pint-glass icons next to Brewlytics coasters and a table tent.

Its pricing is the thing most worth knowing:

Basic — free. One screen, unlimited taps, single-TV casting, no advertisements.
Premium — $30/month per location, or $290/year (about $24/month). Unlimited screens, QR code menus, printed menus, and an embed for your website.

Verified on Pourwall's site, September 2026.

That free tier is not a crippled trial. For a one-room taproom with a single screen over the bar, it is a complete answer to the problem you set out to solve.

Brewlytics — a customer platform that draws menus

Brewlytics connects to your POS (Square today; Toast and Arryved next) and builds a structured picture of your beer and your customers. Menus — TV displays and print — are one surface of that. So are loyalty, taste-segmented release alerts, an AI bartender for your website, and the analytics behind them.

The menus are genuinely good: offline-cached so a Wi-Fi blip doesn't blank the screen mid-service, AI-generated backgrounds so your board doesn't look like everyone else's template, print-ready PDFs from the same live list. But they are not the reason the product exists.

The comparison, in one table

	Pourwall	Brewlytics
What it is	Digital beverage menu service	Brewery customer platform; menus are one surface
Free tier	Yes — 1 screen, unlimited taps	Yes — brewery presence in the Barley app
Paid	$30/mo per location, or $290/yr (verified Sep 2026)	$99/mo + per-active-customer
Devices	FireTV, Chromecast, Google TV, Android TV	Any TV with a streaming stick
Print menus	Yes, on Premium	Yes
QR + website embed	Yes, on Premium	QR yes; AI chat widget for the site
Knows what's pouring	Yes — you tell it	Yes — read from your POS
Knows who drank it	No	Yes — taste profile per customer
Segmented release alerts	No	Yes — iMessage, SMS + email

Read the last two rows. Everything above them is a menu feature, and Pourwall does menu features well at a price Brewlytics does not try to beat.

Example Brewery Scenario

Two breweries, same street, different answers.

A brewery owner in a work shirt and boots, tablet tucked under one arm, talking with a bartender across the end of the bar in a quiet afternoon taproom, brewhouse tanks and a row of tap handles behind them.

Cascade Yard is a 5-barrel taproom with twelve taps, one TV over the bar, and an owner who also brews. They want the screen to be right. Pourwall's free tier does that, on a Fire TV stick from the drugstore. Paying $99 a month for a platform would be paying for nine things to fix one. Pourwall is the correct choice, and if they asked me I would tell them so.

Fogline Brewing is four years in, two locations, 2,100 people on an email list, and a Square history going back to opening day. Their problem is no longer the screen — it is that they tap a hazy IPA on Thursday and have no idea which 340 of those 2,100 people have bought a hazy before. A menu tool cannot answer that, because it never sees the transaction. It reads the beer list; it does not read the till.

Fogline's screen and Fogline's customer problem look like one project and are not. Cascade Yard's are the same project, and it is small.

Practical Checklist

Barley sits at a taproom table pointing at a laptop screen of simple charts while a brewery owner leans on his hand and studies it, a notebook and two glasses of amber beer on the wood between them.

Count your screens and your ambitions separately. One screen and no marketing plans? Free tier, today.
Try Pourwall's free tier before paying anyone. Including us. If it solves the whole problem, you're done.
Ask what reads your POS. A menu tool reads a beer list you maintain. A platform reads transactions. Only the second can tell you who drank what.
Price the print need honestly. If you print menus, Pourwall Premium at $30/month covers screen + QR + print, which is good value for the job.
Look at your Square item-level history once. Export it and look at your top 200 customers' orders. If that view changes what you'd send this month, you have a data problem, not a menu problem.

How Brewlytics Helps

If you decide the customer side is the real work, here's what the menu connects to:

Customer Taste Profiles build from POS purchase history plus in-app ratings — the layer that knows a specific regular drinks hazy IPAs and avoids dark lagers. (How customer insights work)
Taproom Menus drive TV displays and print from one live tap list, offline-cached so the screen survives a network drop. (See the menus feature)
Campaign Automation sends taste-matched release alerts over iMessage, SMS and email to the people whose palates match the beer.
Barley, the AI bartender, answers "what should I try?" on your website and in the taproom — and sharpens the taste profile every time. (What is an AI bartender?)

For the wider field, see the roundup of digital beer menu software. If you're weighing the check-in network instead, see Brewlytics vs Untappd for Business.

FAQ

See the schema-ready FAQ block at the end of the page for the full set.

Ready to see what your POS already knows?

Put a menu on the wall with whatever tool fits — genuinely, if that's Pourwall's free tier, use it. Then ask the harder question: when that hazy IPA goes on tap Thursday, does anything in your stack know who to tell?

Book a walkthrough and we'll show you the taste segments already sitting in your Square history, or read more about what Brewlytics does for breweries.

Frequently asked questions

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A Raspberry Pi board in a clear case on the dark wood of a brewery back bar at night, a ribbon cable trailing off it and a coiled HDMI cable and brass keg wrench beside it, with a glowing tap-list screen far out of focus behind.

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Want to see this working in your brewery?

Go Pro to see your customers and act on the data — taste profiles, segmented iMessage, SMS + email campaigns, the AI bartender, and the full dashboard. Or book a walkthrough with the brewer who built it. Not ready? Start free, no card.

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