Beverage Cost Calculator for Liquor, Beer and Wine

The pour cost formula

The calculator follows the same path for every kind of drink:

1. Convert the container to ounces. A 750 ml bottle is 25.36 ounces, a liter is 33.81, a 1.75 liter is 59.17, and a half-barrel keg is 1,984.
2. Remove a loss allowance for spillage, overpouring, foam and line cleaning. What's left is the usable volume.
3. Divide usable volume by the pour size to get the number of sellable pours.
4. Divide the container cost by the number of pours to get product cost per pour, then add mixers, juice and garnish.
5. Divide cost per drink by your menu price to get pour cost, or divide it by your target pour cost to get a price.

Three worked examples

A well spirit. A 1-liter bottle costs $18. With a 1.5-ounce pour and a 5 percent loss allowance, usable volume is about 32.1 ounces, which gives roughly 21.4 pours. Product cost is about 84 cents a pour. Add 35 cents of mixer and garnish and the drink costs $1.19. At $8, that's a pour cost near 15 percent.

Wine by the glass. A 750 ml bottle costs $14. With a 5-ounce pour and the same allowance, you get about 4.8 glasses, so each glass costs about $2.90. Many restaurants price a glass so that one glass roughly covers the bottle cost; at $12 the pour cost is about 24 percent.

Draft beer. A half-barrel costs $190. With a 16-ounce pour and a 10 percent allowance for foam and line loss, you get about 111.6 pints at about $1.70 each. At $7, pour cost is about 24 percent. If your counts show you're only selling 95 pints per keg, your real allowance is closer to 23 percent, and that's the number to fix.

How to use the calculator

Pick the container, enter what you pay for it, then the pour size. For cocktails, enter the total spirit in the drink as the pour (for example 2 ounces) and put the other ingredients in the "other" field. Add a loss allowance, a target, and your current price if you have one. Download the CSV for each drink and you have a simple costed bar menu.

Where the money leaks

Free pours and heavy hands are the usual suspects. A bartender who pours 1.75 ounces instead of 1.5 is giving away one drink in every seven, which is why jiggers or measured pourers pay for themselves quickly.

Comps and "buybacks" are the next leak. They can be good hospitality, but they need to be rung in so you can see them. An unrecorded comp looks exactly like theft in your inventory numbers.

On draft systems, temperature and pressure matter. Warm beer or wrong gas pressure produces foam, foam goes down the drain, and the keg comes up short. Line cleaning also costs some beer each time, which belongs in your allowance.

Last, count. Weekly bottle counts, or at least counts on your top sellers, are the only way to compare what you should have sold with what you rang up. The calculator gives you the theory. The count tells you how close the bar is getting.

A note on responsible service

Pricing never replaces training. Make sure everyone who serves alcohol knows your state's rules on service, ID checks and refusing service, and that managers back them up when they cut someone off.