The Bar  Pour Cost Guide

By Rob Bruni, founder of OpsEdge Hospitality, twenty years running restaurants, bars, clubs and resorts. Updated November 2026.

Free printable: Bar Inventory Count Night checklist (PDF)

Pour cost is what a drink costs you to make divided by what you sell it for, as a percent. Beverage is usually the highest-margin thing a restaurant or bar sells, which is exactly why a few points of pour cost disappear without anyone noticing. This guide covers the two ways to calculate it, the benchmarks by category, a worked example, the variance report that catches losses a P&L never will, and the fixes in the order they pay back.

What pour cost is

Pour cost (also called beverage cost or liquor cost) is the beverage half of cost of goods sold. A 20 percent pour cost means 20 cents of every beverage sales dollar bought the product in the glass and 80 cents is left for labor, rent and profit.

It gets calculated at two levels and both matter. At the drink level, it tells you whether a cocktail is priced right. At the operation level, measured from inventory, it tells you whether what you poured matches what you sold. The gap between the two is where bars lose money.

The pour cost formula, two ways

Per drink (theoretical pour cost)

A 750 ml bottle is 25.4 ounces. A one liter bottle is 33.8 ounces. At a 1.5 ounce pour, a 750 gives you about 16.9 pours and a liter about 22.5. Build in a small spill allowance (most operators use 5 percent) when you set prices, because no bar pours a bottle perfectly.

For the operation (actual pour cost)

This is the number that goes on the P&L and the one that includes everything the drink-level number cannot see: over-pours, spills, comps that were not rung in, breakage and theft. Measure it against beverage sales, not total sales, and split it by category (liquor, beer, wine, non-alcoholic) because they run at very different percentages.

Pour cost benchmarks by category

Two rules for reading the table. First, dollars beat percentages: a $14 cocktail at 22 percent makes you $10.92, a $7 beer at 20 percent makes you $5.60. Second, a blended number hides problems. A bar at 21 percent overall can have liquor at 24 and beer at 18, which means the spirits are leaking and the beer is covering for it.

A worked example

Variance: the number behind the number

Variance is the difference between what you should have used (theoretical, from what the POS says you sold) and what you actually used (from the count). It is the single most useful number in bar management because it is the only one that separates a pricing problem from a pouring problem.

• Actual is high and theoretical is also high: your prices or your recipes are wrong. Fix the menu.
• Actual is high and theoretical is fine: product is leaving the bar without being rung in. Fix the pouring, the comps or the people.

A variance under 2 points is tight. Two to four points is normal for a bar that counts monthly and has not focused on it. Over five points means roughly one in every twenty drinks is free, and it is worth finding out who is pouring it. Running variance by product, not just by category, usually points straight at the two or three bottles that account for most of the gap, and those are usually the well spirits and the most popular call brands.

Why pour cost runs high

• Over-pouring. A quarter ounce over on a 1.5 ounce pour is 17 percent more product in every drink. Free pouring without regular spot checks drifts up over time, not down.
• Comps, spills and mistakes that are not rung in. A drink that is remade or given away without a POS entry shows up as variance with no explanation.
• Stale pricing. Distributor prices move. A bottle that went from $22 to $26 moves a 20 percent drink to 23.6 percent on its own.
• Recipe drift. The cocktail spec says 1.5 ounces, the bartender who trained the new bartender pours 2.
• Draft waste. Foam, line cleaning losses and the last inch of every keg. A keg that should yield 124 pints at 16 ounces often yields 110.
• Wine spoilage. An open bottle of by-the-glass wine that does not sell out in two to three days is poured down the drain.
• Theft. Unrung drinks for friends, bottles out the back door, or sales rung in then voided. The count is the only defence.
• Nobody counts. Without a regular count there is no actual pour cost, only a guess, and every problem above is invisible.

How to bring pour cost down

1. Count weekly. Liquor and draft at least, by tenths of a bottle or by weight. The bar inventory guide covers how to do it in under an hour. Counting alone usually tightens variance by a point because behaviour changes when people know the bottles are checked.
2. Run variance by product. Compare what the POS says you sold against what the count says you used, bottle by bottle. Start with the top 20 by volume.
3. Spec every drink and post the specs. Pour size, glass, build and garnish, where the bartenders can see it. Train to the spec and spot-check with a jigger or a scale once a week.
4. Ring everything. Comps, spills, remakes, staff drinks and manager pours all go through the POS with a reason code. A comp that is rung in is a known cost. One that is not is a mystery.
5. Re-cost the menu quarterly. Current distributor prices against current recipes. Reprice what has drifted, or change the spec.
6. Manage draft like a product. Track keg yield, clean lines on schedule, check pressure and temperature, and train the first pour of the shift.
7. Set by-the-glass pars. Only open what will sell in two days, use preservation on anything that will not, and track open bottles.
8. Review the void and comp report every shift. Patterns by bartender, by hour and by item show up within two weeks.

A bar that has not been counting usually drops two to four points of actual pour cost in the first 60 days, most of it from variance rather than pricing. On $40,000 a month of beverage sales that is $800 to $1,600 a month. Our Playbooks and Toolkits include the bar inventory spreadsheet and cocktail costing sheets we use, and the Prime Cost System covers beverage alongside food and labor.

Related guides and tools

Free tool: the cocktail cost calculator costs any drink ingredient by ingredient from bottle prices and gives you the price that hits your target. No signup.

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