Author, hospitality industry authority, and active dram shop expert witness.
Ryan Dahlstrom has spent over twenty years doing the work that most of his industry only talks about. He has opened bars, rescued failing ones, written the training manuals that staff actually use, and sat across from attorneys in depositions explaining what should have happened before a preventable tragedy occurred. That combination — hands-on operator, published author, active expert witness — is the foundation of everything on this site.
If you are researching a bartender training program for your venue, preparing a dram shop case, building a curriculum for a restaurant group, or trying to understand where training and liability actually intersect, this page is the context you need.
Ryan’s career began in high-volume nightclubs and bars, where he learned the operational disciplines that separate profitable venues from the ones that burn out their staff, lose money on shrinkage, and eventually become news stories for the wrong reasons. He worked his way through every role behind the bar and in management, building the pattern recognition that only comes from being the person responsible when something goes wrong on a Saturday night.
By the mid-2000s, he was managing multi-unit operations and running turnaround projects for struggling venues. He founded Rescue My Bar and traveled nationwide, restructuring operations that had lost their way. This was where the proprietary audit systems and training frameworks that now underpin his expert witness work first took shape. You cannot build a real audit system from theory. You have to build it from closing shifts that did not balance, from incidents that should have been prevented, and from staff members who were set up to fail because nobody bothered to write the standards down.
In 2015, Ryan published The Bar Starts Here through 1-Ounce Publishing. Over 65,000 copies have been distributed worldwide, establishing what has become a standard reference in bar management, staff training, and operational compliance. The book condensed more than a decade of operational experience into the financial models, inventory controls, and staff training protocols that working operators could actually implement.
The Ultimate Responsible Alcohol Service Manual, the flagship product sold through this site, followed the same philosophy. It is not a compliance pamphlet or a certification test prep. It is 140 pages of integrated training and operations documentation, written to meet the documentation standards that hold up in court, covering everything from bartender onboarding through incident reporting, state regulations, dram shop liability, crisis management, and manager responsibilities.
In total, Ryan has authored more than 1,000 pages of training and operations documentation currently in use across the hospitality industry. This body of work is the reason the expert witness practice makes sense. It is also the foundation of the content library on this site.
In 2019, Ryan founded Bar Expert Witness and began accepting engagements as a consulting and testifying expert in matters involving dram shop liability, alcohol service negligence, negligent security, and premises liability in hospitality venues. He works both plaintiff and defense engagements nationwide.
His approach to expert work is deliberately different from the industry norm. He does not track his case outcomes. He does not position himself as a hired gun for either side. His credibility comes from the fact that his testimony is grounded in the same operational standards he has been writing, training on, and implementing for over two decades. When he explains what a reasonable operator should have done, he is explaining what he has personally done, trained others to do, and documented in published training manuals that predate any case he has ever been retained for.
This is why attorneys vetting experts tend to find his published work first. The manuals, the books, the documented training frameworks — they exist because Ryan built them as an operator, not as a consultant retained after the fact. For more on the expert witness practice specifically, see thedramshopexpert.com and expertwitness.co.
Beyond the core hospitality work, Ryan has expanded into adjacent areas of liability expertise, including commercial construction, equine facility liability, premises security, and Texas TABC Safe Harbor defense. The Expert Witness Team, which Ryan co-founded, brings together subject-matter experts across multiple industries for comprehensive litigation support.
He is also the founder of The DAM Lab, a marketing and media operation that serves hospitality clients and specialized professional practices. The combination of deep operational expertise and practical marketing execution has become its own form of competitive advantage.
bartendertrainingmanual.com exists to make the training content Ryan has been writing for two decades accessible to the operators, trainers, and legal professionals who need it. The primary product is The Ultimate Responsible Alcohol Service Manual. The content library around it — covering training curriculum, responsible beverage service, documentation, competency assessment, and training liability — provides the context that helps readers understand what defensible training actually looks like.
This is one of several sites in a network that all point to Ryan as the author. For the publisher relationship, books and other manuals, visit 1-Ounce Publishing at 1-ounce.com. For the expert witness practice, visit The Dram Shop Expert. For Ryan’s primary author presence and venture portfolio, visit ryandahlstrom.expert.
Ryan is based in Tucson, Arizona, and works with clients nationwide. He is available for consulting engagements, bulk manual licensing, media and speaking opportunities, and expert witness retainers. Use the Contact page to reach out, and specify the nature of the inquiry so it is routed correctly.
The most direct way to reach Ryan is through this site’s Contact page for hospitality and publishing inquiries, or through expertwitness.co for legal and expert witness engagements. He is also on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/ryandahlstrom1.
If you would like to purchase The Ultimate Responsible Alcohol Service Manual, visit the product page. If you would like to explore the training content library first, start with the Training Library.
