Paint and Sip Nights in Your Taproom
Full at five, empty by eight
Knock off on a Thursday and the taproom hums. Roller doors up, everyone standing, half the room still in hi vis or lanyards, three deep at the taps. Then somewhere around seven thirty the shape of the night changes. People finish their second, look at each other, and go and find dinner.
That is the whole problem in one sentence. Nothing in the building holds anyone past their second beer. No kitchen, no menu, no reason to sit down. Staff are rostered until close and the back half of the shift is wiping benches.
The other thing you already know: it is largely the same crowd every time, and it skews young and male. Blokes who follow the brewery, know the tap list, and turn up because they already like what you make. A good problem to have, and a small pool to keep fishing in.
Paint Juicy books that empty stretch. We put 40 to 80 people in your taproom on a night you would otherwise be quiet, most of them people who have never set foot in a brewery, and they buy every drink from your bar.
What we are actually proposing
No venue fee, no commission, no hire charge. Hosting a session costs you nothing, and that is not a soft launch offer with a catch on the back end. Paint Juicy is paid by the guests through ticket sales, so we do not need to be paid by you.
What you put in is the taproom and the taps. Nothing else. That is the entire ask. We bring ticket sales, the marketing and advertising, customer service, the host artist, the PA, every art material, complete setup and complete pack down. Your staff do nothing different. They pour beer as they would on any other night.
People filter in early evening, the session runs about three hours, and the taproom is back to itself not long after the last canvas goes home the finish. Everything they drink they buy at your bar. That is your revenue and it is the entire point of the arrangement.
We are 100% mobile across Queensland, New South Wales and the Northern Territory. No studio, and no travel fees inside our service regions.
Changing who is in the room
Your taproom has already found its crowd
Everything a brewery does to market itself talks to people already interested in beer. The post about the new hazy pale reaches people who follow breweries. The tap takeover reaches drinkers who chase tap takeovers. It all works, and it all works on the same pool. Growing takings means winning a slightly bigger share of a crowd that already knows you exist.
There is a second group entirely, sitting in the same suburb, who have never had a single reason to walk through your door. Not because they dislike beer. Because a taproom has never been the thing they were doing that night.
Who a paint and sip night brings through the door
The people who book us are women aged 30 to 90, and most of them land somewhere between 35 and 65. They do not come alone. They come in sixes and eights and twelves, for a birthday, a hens do, a work team night, or the simple fact that four friends have been trying to organise something since March.
These are people who go out deliberately. They book ahead, pay ahead, turn up on time, and treat the night as the event rather than a warm up to one. For most of them your taproom is somewhere they have driven past and never had a reason to stop.
How they drink, which is not how your regulars drink
A tap list that reads as a wall of unfamiliar names stops being intimidating the moment somebody is sitting still for three hours with friends who are all curious at once. Paddles do well, because a table that cannot decide will order four small ones and argue about them. So do the sours, the fruited ones, the ginger beer and the low alcohol taps, exactly the pours a hardcore weekday crowd walks past.
They also drink across the whole night rather than in a rush at the start. There is a natural rhythm to a painting session, layers have to dry, and guests get up and go back to the bar in between without anyone prompting them. Nobody is watching the clock waiting to move on to a restaurant, because there is nowhere else they are going.
They stay for the whole three hours
A guest who has bought a ticket, been handed a canvas and started a painting is not leaving at the halfway mark. Your quiet stretch, roughly eight until close, is the exact window the session occupies. Same roster, same staff, a full room instead of an empty one.
Nothing about your regular crowd changes
This is not a rebrand or an attempt to make your taproom something it is not. It is one night, on a date you choose, in a slot currently doing very little. Your Friday stays your Friday, and the Thursday knock off crowd is not displaced, because this usually lands on a Tuesday or a Wednesday.
What changes is that a group of people who had never considered a brewery spend three hours in yours, learn which of your beers they like, and go home knowing your name and where to find you. If you want to see how that plays out across a full year of dates, our Queensland paint and sip events calendar shows the sort of run we book into venue partners.
Who supplies what
How the bookings actually arrive
Two kinds of night land in a taproom. A public session goes on sale and fills with individual tickets and small groups. A private booking is one group taking the whole thing, usually a hens party, a milestone birthday or a work team after something that is not another set of bowling lanes.
Either way the group sizes are the useful bit. A single birthday booking can be fourteen people who arrive within ten minutes of each other and all want a drink at once, which is a very different bar shape to a trickle of singles.
The energy suits a taproom too. This is not the quiet, heads down, sit and daub format. There is music, there is singing, and the room gets loud in the good way. A brewery is one of the few venues where nobody will complain about that.
Our space is industrial, concrete and steel. Is that a problem?
Honestly, it beats a carpeted function room most days of the week.
Start with the floor. Painting happens, and so does spilling. A sealed concrete floor with a drain in it is the most forgiving surface in hospitality. Nothing we do marks it, and nobody spends the night holding their breath over a rug.
Then the furniture. Long communal benches are already close to the right depth for painting, and they already seat groups facing each other, which is precisely the layout we would build if the room were empty. Bar tables and stools work as well. What is genuinely awkward is a room full of small round tables with linen on them, and you do not have one.
The hard surfaces help more than people expect. A shed of steel and concrete is a live room, so music and a voice on a PA land properly in it. A carpeted function room with a low ceiling swallows sound and the night has to work harder to feel like anything. Yours does the opposite for free.
Lighting is the same story. Bright, honest overhead light is what you want when 60 people are trying to see what colour they just mixed. Dim and atmospheric looks lovely and is a nuisance to paint under.
And the look itself is not a compromise to apologise for. Exposed tanks, steel, a roller door and a polished slab read as a proper night out to a group who booked something a bit different. Nobody arrives at a brewery hoping it will feel like a community hall. For the same argument in another kind of hard, open room, see hosting a paint and sip night at a rooftop venue, or the write up for licensed bars hosting a paint and sip night, the closest thing to a taproom in the rest of the set.
Paint Juicy, by the numbers
The facts, straight
- More than 42,000 guests have painted with us
- 4.9 stars on Google
- Recognised as a Best of Queensland Experience every year since 2022
- Public sessions are $59 AUD a head
- Bottomless sessions are $99 a head and are strictly 18+
- Private bookings are $700 flat for the first 10 guests, then $65 per additional guest, minimum 10 paid seats
- Our audience is female, 30 to 90, with the biggest group between 35 and 65
- Typical session size is 40 to 80 guests
Questions breweries ask
Do we need a kitchen or any food service to host a session?
No. The session runs on drinks, not dinner. Guests tend to eat before they arrive or grab something from whatever food truck you have parked out the front, and plenty of them are perfectly happy on a beer and a bag of chips for three hours. Nothing about the night depends on you plating anything.
Will a paint and sip crowd actually drink beer?
Yes, and they order in a way that suits a taproom. Paddles do very well with a table that wants to try before it commits, and the sours, the fruited ones, the ginger beer and the low alcohol taps all get worked hard. Guests buy every drink at your bar across the whole session, which is the entire point of the arrangement.
Do we have to move tanks or change the taproom layout?
No. We work around whatever is bolted down and we set up in the space you already use for drinkers. All we need is roughly 60cm of table per painter and somewhere for the host artist to stand where the room can see them. Setup and pack down are ours, and the taproom goes back exactly as we found it.
Can we run a session around a new release or a tap takeover?
Yes, and it is a good use of a night when you want people standing in front of a beer you are trying to launch. Tell us what is pouring and when, and we will look at booking a session that puts a full room in your taproom on that date.
What does hosting cost us?
Nothing. There is no venue fee, no commission and no hire charge, because Paint Juicy is paid by the guests through ticket sales. You supply the room and the bar, your staff work the bar as they would on any other night, and everything taken over that bar is yours.
Tell us about your taproom
A night that goes quiet early and a room that holds 40 to 80 people around some benches is the whole qualification. Send us your quiet night, your rough capacity and where you are, and we will come back with what a session in your space looks like.
Prefer to read the mechanics first? The full explainer on hosting a paint and sip night at your venue walks through every step, and the Paint Juicy venue partner directory covers the other venue types we work with.
Get in touch about a session at your brewery
Trent & James
