I'm not sure how much time and resources you want to put into market research but here are a few quick items to consider.
Market research:
A) Define your target segment(s)
You can use a lot of different descriptors for your segment, geographic, demographic, behavioral and so on. I recommend starting with geographic and demographic. First define who your customer is, for instance:
Joe
Age 25 - 35
Income range $XXXX - $XXXX per year/month.
Family situation : Single, married, kids or no kids.
Then find our how many Joes are in your area.
B) Once you know how many Joes are in the area, do a survey in a Joe-heavy location, to figure out things like "How often do you go out", "Out of our 8 competitors, which do you prefer?", "What is the most important thing you look for in a bar/pub.
C) Once you know how many Joes there are, and have an idea of how they behave, you can do a calculation like:
- Your bar is too expensive for them.
- They prefer BMC.
- They don't drink.
- They haven't heard of your bar.
Until you get a more realistic number of potential customers.
Example:
There are 5000 Joes in my area, out of the 300 Joes surveyed 85% said they would frequent my establishment. 4250 left.
20% of them won't hear of my bar.
4250 * 0.80 = 3400 left.
15% of those live outside of walking distance
3400 *0,85 = 2890 left.
And so on.
Cost calculations:
I would also do a few cost calculations to see what your running costs are going to be, to find the break-even point. Once you have an idea of your fixed and variable costs you can work backwards:
If you have a 50% margin on the beer you sell (cost of production $1 per bottle/glass) then you make $1 per bottle, that means that if you have costs of $1000 per month (not counting beer production) you need to sell 1000 bottles/glasses to break even.
If there are 5000 Joes in your area, this means that each Joe has to buy 0.2 bottles.
This is mostly to figure out whether your business proposal is overly optimistic or overly pessimistic. For instance, if you identify 20 Joes, each of them would have to buy 50 bottles per month, which breaks down to a little over 1 per day.
Positioning map:
I like using a positioning map to analyze the market. The axis on the map should be two of the most important choice criteria your customers use. I used price and quality in the example. This is really useful for getting an idea of where there are "gaps" in the market. Note that just because there is a gap, doesn't mean the position is good, the gap could exist due to the position being unprofitable.
I can expand on market/business analysis if you want, but I think this post is approaching wall-of-text already.