Custom Brewery Shirts and Taproom Merch
Custom brewery shirts, screen printed taproom staff tees, and brewery merch that sells over the bar. Olive Branch Apparel prints for breweries who need staff uniforms and retail merch out of the same order.
Brewery t-shirts, taproom staff shirts, custom beer merch, and embroidered brewery hats. Design yours below and see brewery shirt pricing before you commit.
Your Brewery Shirt Has Two Completely Different Jobs
Almost every brewery order we print is really two orders wearing the same logo. Confusing them is the fastest way to overspend or to end up with merch that will not sell.
Taproom staff shirts
Staff brewery shirts are workwear. They get worn four shifts a week, splashed with beer, and washed hot. They need to be identifiable across a loud room and cheap enough to replace when somebody quits.
Buy these on durability and price, not on fashion. A solid mid-weight screen printed brewery tee in a color nobody else in the room is wearing does the job. Keep the design simple and put it somewhere visible from the bar.
Retail brewery merch
Custom beer merch sold over the bar is a product, not a uniform. It competes with every other shirt in a customer's closet, so it has to be something they would buy if your logo were not on it.
Spend up here. Softer shirts, better fits, more interesting artwork. Retail brewery t-shirts carry a real margin at a taproom price point, and the customer becomes a walking sign for the next two years.
The mistake is buying one shirt for both jobs. Either you overpay to put a premium tee on a dishwasher, or you put a scratchy uniform blank on your retail rack and watch it sit there all season.
Brewery Apparel We Print and Embroider
Screen Printed Brewery Tees
The workhorse. Custom brewery shirts for staff and retail, printed cheap at volume and tough enough for a brewhouse floor.
Taproom Staff Uniforms
Custom taproom shirts that read instantly across a busy room, in colors that separate staff from customers.
Embroidered Brewery Hats
Custom brewery hats and beanies. No season, no expiry, and the highest margin item on most taproom merch shelves.
Design Your Brewery Shirts Here
Drop your brewery logo on a real shirt, set the run size, and watch custom brewery shirt pricing move as you go. Opened on a soft retail-weight tee, which is what most taprooms sell over the bar.
Price staff shirts and retail merch together.
Same artwork, one setup, two jobs. That single decision usually saves the most.
Timing Brewery Merch To Your Release Calendar
Breweries have a rhythm most businesses do not, and custom brewery shirts sell hardest when they are tied to it. Ordering merch on a random Tuesday leaves money on the table.
The single best merch week of the year for most taprooms. Dated anniversary brewery t-shirts sell out because the scarcity is real. Order these tight and let them go.
A limited custom beer merch run tied to a seasonal beer moves fast among regulars. Keep the run small and the artwork specific to that beer.
Staff need clean brewery shirts for every festival, and festivals sell retail merch to people who have never been to your taproom. Order staff and retail together.
Your undated logo brewery tee should never be out of stock. This is the shirt that quietly outsells everything over twelve months.
The practical version of this: keep one undated custom brewery shirt design in constant stock, and run small dated batches around anniversaries and seasonal beers. That mix sells through far better than one big annual order of a single design.
Printing Brewery Logos That Are Full Of Detail
Brewery branding tends to be gorgeous and complicated. Hop cones, mountain ranges, engraved linework, and a lot of small type. That looks incredible on a can and it needs thought before it goes on a custom brewery shirt.
Screen printing reproduces flat color beautifully and struggles with fine gradients. If your brewery logo has an engraved or etched look, it usually needs converting to halftones, which changes the texture slightly. We will show you exactly what that looks like on the proof before printing any brewery t-shirts.
Small text is the other trap. Type under about a quarter inch tall fills in on a cotton tee, especially on dark shirts where an underbase is involved. Established dates, city names, and tagline text on custom brewery shirts often need bumping up a size to stay readable.
If your artwork is genuinely full-color, direct-to-film printing handles it at one flat price no matter how many colors are in the file. That is often the better call for a small retail brewery merch drop where the design is complex and the run is short.
Send us whatever you have, including the can art. We will tell you honestly which method suits the design and where it needs adjusting before it hits a shirt.
Anniversary or release date coming?
Tell us when and we will work the schedule backward from it.
Making Brewery Merch An Actual Revenue Line
Most taprooms treat custom brewery shirts as marketing that happens to earn a little. The breweries that do well with merch treat it as a product line with its own margin, and the difference in annual revenue between those two mindsets is substantial.
Start with where it sits. Brewery merch stacked behind the bar sells to people who already decided to ask. Merch on an open shelf at eye level, in the queue, sells to people who were not thinking about it at all. Moving the same custom brewery shirts from behind the bar to the queue routinely doubles what they move, and it costs nothing.
Then think about who is actually buying. Taproom merch buyers are overwhelmingly first-time or occasional visitors, not regulars. Regulars already own your shirt. That means the design should communicate something to somebody who has been in the building for forty minutes, not reward deep knowledge of your brand. Inside jokes and obscure references sell poorly on custom brewery shirts for exactly this reason.
Size your first retail run honestly. A brewery doing 200 covers on a good weekend does not need 500 shirts. Order 72 to 144 of a strong design, watch what actually sells, then reorder. Because we hold your screens, the second run of brewery t-shirts costs less than the first and turns around in about two weeks. Guessing high on a first order is how taprooms end up marking merch down at Christmas.
Consider the price point carefully too. Custom brewery shirts at a taproom price sit in a strange middle ground where customers compare them to band merch rather than to retail clothing. That comparison works in your favor, because a brewery tee at that price reads as fair while carrying a healthier margin than most owners realize once the run is large enough.
Finally, put the merch where the staff can talk about it. A bartender mentioning that a shirt just landed does more volume than any sign, and it costs nothing but telling your team that the new custom brewery shirts arrived.
Brewery Shirt Questions
How many custom brewery shirts should we order?
For staff, count your roster and add a third, because people quit and shifts overlap. For retail brewery merch, most taprooms do best ordering 72 to 144 of a core design rather than a huge single run. Price both quantities in the studio above and you will see exactly where the per-shirt cost settles.
Can we order staff shirts and retail merch in one order?
Yes, and you should. Running custom taproom staff shirts and retail brewery t-shirts together shares the screen setup if the artwork matches, which drops the cost on both. Different shirt colors and different blanks are fine inside one order.
What shirt works best for brewery staff?
A mid-weight cotton or cotton blend in a dark color. Dark hides spills, mid-weight survives hot washing, and cotton breathes in a hot brewhouse. Avoid anything too soft or too light for staff brewery shirts, because they wear through fast under real use.
Do you print brewery hats and other merch?
We do. Embroidered brewery hats, beanies, hoodies, and crewnecks all run alongside your custom brewery shirts. Hats in particular are worth carrying because they never go out of season and hold their margin.
Can we do a limited run for one beer release?
Absolutely, and small runs are exactly what direct-to-film is for. A 24 to 48 piece custom beer merch drop for a seasonal release prices reasonably without screen setup, so you can test a design without committing to a full print run.
How long does a brewery merch order take?
About 14 days from proof approval to delivery on standard custom brewery shirt orders. If you are tying merch to an anniversary or a release date, work backward from that and give yourself buffer, then put the hard date on the quote form.
Should our brewery merch match our can artwork?
Related, not identical. Can art is designed to work at four inches on a shelf surrounded by competitors. Custom brewery shirts are read across a room and worn by a person who wants to look good. Pulling the same palette and typography while simplifying the composition usually beats reproducing the can label literally.
Can we sell brewery merch online as well as in the taproom?
Plenty of our brewery customers do. It changes your size spread more than anything else, since online buyers skew toward the size extremes that taproom walk-ins rarely ask for. If you are stocking for both, widen the range slightly on your custom brewery shirts rather than ordering the same curve twice.
Do dated anniversary shirts really sell better?
For a short window, yes, noticeably. Scarcity is real when the date genuinely cannot repeat. The trap is ordering anniversary brewery t-shirts at the same volume as your core design and then carrying the remainder forever. Order dated runs deliberately small and let them sell out.
Where we are
Olive Branch Apparel
706 East Stuart Street
Fort Collins, CO 80525
Get Your Taproom Kitted Out
Staff shirts and shelf merch come off the same run, so order them together. Build it below, or hand us your release calendar.