How to use your print menu settings

Use this help doc as an overview of the many print menu settings you can adjust to make your print menu really, truly your print menu.

(Note: This help doc references our brand new print menu, so if the images below don’t look like your menu or menu design and settings page, it’s not an error—the menu is still in it’s testing phase and not everyone has automatic access yet. However, if you’d like access to the new menu, just schedule a call with our support team and we’ll get you all squared away.)

Overview

All settings and design tools are nested within 4 panels on the left side of the page:

Theme
Structure
Content
Customize

To expose the settings within each grouping, just click the panel name (e.g. "Structure").

This doc will walk through all your print menu settings in the order they appear on your print menu settings page.

Important note: whenever you make a settings update, your menu preview will immediately reload, reflecting the changes you made. No need for any other changes!

Theme

Because there’s still a ton of customizing you can do on top of your theme (as we’ll get into in the "Content" and "Customize" panels), it’s helpful to think of your menu's theme as the base of your menu: your theme will accomplish a ton (and can be super effective as is), but you're still free to take your design further.

As you'll see, there are 5 themes:

Simple: stripped-down, straightforward feel (this theme is the classic BeerMenus print menu that was available prior to the launch or our new print menu).
Clean: Tidy, modern feel
Retro: Throwback, ornamented feel
Bold: Strong, embellished feel
Pub: Classic restaurant or bar

To choose a theme, click its thumbnail preview:

As soon as you click a theme, your menu preview will reload, so you can see how it looks. You can change themes as often as you like.

Structure

Use the tools in the Structure panel to choose your paper size, columns, menu section breaks, sort options, and spacing.
Paper size

Currently there are two paper sizes available for menus: letter (8.5 x 11) and legal (8.5 x 14).

The default setting is letter (by far the most popular), but if you’d like to use legal instead, simply click the button corresponding to legal.

Legal-size paper works well for businesses who have extremely long menus—the extra 3 inches of length mean you can fit a lot more menu items onto a single page.

Columns

Here you can choose to use 1, 2, or 3 columns on your menu. As you can read in our help doc about menu getting your menu to fit on a certain number of pages, the higher the column number, the more menu items you can fit on a single page.

Breaks between menu sections

As the setting itself states, having breaks between menu sections "On" makes individual sections more distinct, since it includes a full page-width break between sections, like this:

By default, breaks between menu sections is "On."

If you switch breaks between menu sections off, you'll save space on your menu, since the break is only a column-width and doesn't include much spacing. Here's how that looks:

Sort options

These sort options will apply to your entire menu, though one kind of beverage will never intermingle with another kind of beverage (i.e. beers won’t be mixed in with wines) unless you manually move them into the same menu sections.

The options themselves are straightforward—sorting alphabetically does exactly that, and grouping and sorting menu items by style will group items by style.

Sorting beers by style would pull all your IPAs, Double IPAs, American pale ales, etc. into a menu sub-section called “hoppy.” Stouts, imperial stouts, porters, etc. would go into a subsection called “Dark & Roasty,” and so on.

Spacing

Here you can choose between Comfortable, Cozy, and Compact. Comfortable has the largest font and most spacing, Cozy is in the middle, and Compact has the smallest font and least amount of spacing.

As we write in our help doc about menu spacing/getting your menu to fit on X pages, choose Compact if you want squeeze a lot of menu items onto one page, and choose Comfortable if you’re trying to fill out a full page.

Content

Use the tools in this panel to determine what's on your menu and how it’s ordered.

Menu items

The first item is “Menu items”—if you click the “Update menu items” button, you’ll be brought to your update menu page, where you can add new menu items or edit/remove existing items.

Use the three checkboxes beneath the "Update menu items" button to include/exclude certain pieces of information on your menu. keep in mind that the adjustments you make here will be reflected on all the menu items included on this menu (not just on one menu section).

Header image

The next option is regarding your header. There are two roads you can take here. You can either stick with a text header (update it below) or use a custom header. If you’re sticking with a text header, you can edit it in the Header text field.

Unless you’re going for a very minimalist look, we suggest that you create and use a custom header—this allows you to really brand your menu (with your logo, etc.) and also provides you some more messaging flexibility (you can use the space to advertise specials, flights, social media handles, etc.).

The good news is that we’ll take care of making your custom image header for you, for free. To learn more about that process click here, or if you’d just like to get the process moving, schedule a free menu design consult!

Subheader text and Footer text

Both of these fields are optional—you don’t need to include anything here if you don’t want to. However, if you’d like to add something you can just write whatever you’d like. Once you do, your menu will automatically update to include what you've added.

(Note: You can adjust the font you use for this in the “Content” panel.)

Menu Sections

Here you can reorder your menu sections, choose which sections to include/exclude, and adjust the settings for each of your menu sections.

To move sections up or down, just click on the click and drag icon and then pull the menu sections into the order you’d like them to appear.

To include a menu section, just check the box next to the menu section name. To exclude, make sure the box is unchecked. This can come in handy if you’re making multiple menus for your different beverage types. (I.e. you make one menu profile for your taps and a separate menu profile for your bottles and cans.)

Within each menu section you’ll see a “Settings'” expander. Clicking that allows you to choose whether or not you'd like to include the serving type (e.g. bottle, can, etc.) on the menu, and also lets you choose if you'd like to sort and group the menu items within this section by style. Choosing an option here overrides the general “Sorting option” that we went over in the “Structure” section.

Importantly, you can create your own custom menu sections to include on your menus (i.e. Staff picks, Fall specials, etc.). For more on that, read our help doc about creating using, and managing your custom menu sections.

Customize

Here you can adjust the fonts and font sizes you use on all pieces of your menu, from header to beer descriptions to everything else in between:

It’s a pretty straightforward process—for the relevant section just click the font dropdown and select the font you’d like to use (the font name is written in that font). The same goes for font size. Whenever you’d like to preview your updates, just click “Save & preview.” Your menu preview will immediately reload, reflecting the changes you made.

There are two more in-depth help docs that can be of help as you’re working in the Customize panel: