Pricing by category, wine margins by the glass and by the bottle, costing a cocktail, what moves the beverage mix, and the weekly controls that protect the margin.
By Rob Bruni, founder of OpsEdge Hospitality, twenty years running restaurants, bars, clubs and resorts. Updated November 2026.
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Beverage carries the best margin in the building. A dollar of wine, beer or spirits costs 18 to 24 cents to put in the glass against 28 to 34 cents for food, and it needs less labor to serve. A restaurant that moves its beverage mix from 20 percent of sales to 28 percent lowers its blended prime cost by two to three points without touching a single recipe. This guide covers how to price each category, how wine margins actually work by the glass and by the bottle, how to cost a cocktail, what moves the mix, and the weekly controls that keep the margin from leaking out the back door.
Three things make beverage different from food. The cost percent is lower, the labor to produce a drink is a fraction of the labor to produce a plate, and the product mostly does not spoil. A bottle of bourbon on the shelf is cash that holds its value for years; a case of salmon is cash that is worth nothing on Thursday.
That is why a bar-led concept can run a 50 to 55 percent prime cost while a full service restaurant with the same labor runs 60 to 65. The beverage share of the mix is doing the work. The table below shows what happens to a full service restaurant's blended cost of goods as beverage mix rises, holding food cost at 31 percent and beverage cost at 21 percent.
| Beverage share of sales | Blended cost of goods | On $2M in sales, cost of goods is |
|---|---|---|
| 15% | 29.5% | $590,000 |
| 22% | 28.8% | $576,000 |
| 28% | 28.2% | $564,000 |
| 35% | 27.5% | $550,000 |
Every point of mix that moves from food to beverage is worth roughly $2,000 a year on $2 million of sales, and that is before counting the labor it does not need. The program is not a side business. It is the lever.
Beverage is priced from cost up, category by category, because each category has a different cost structure and a different guest expectation. The targets below are the pour cost percentages we use as starting points; the pour cost guide covers the formula in detail.
| Category | Target pour cost | Price as a multiple of cost | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Well spirits | 15 to 18% | 5.5 to 6.5x | Priced for volume; the margin engine of a busy bar |
| Call and premium spirits | 18 to 22% | 4.5 to 5.5x | Guests accept a lower multiple on a bottle they recognize |
| Cocktails | 18 to 22% | 4.5 to 5.5x on total build cost | Cost the whole build, including garnish, juice and ice |
| Draft beer | 18 to 24% | 4 to 5.5x on yielded cost | Price from a 92 to 95 percent keg yield, not the invoice |
| Bottled and canned beer | 22 to 28% | 3.5 to 4.5x | Low waste, lower margin; price for dollars, not percent |
| Wine by the glass | 25 to 35% | Bottle cost per glass, 3 to 4x | Five 5 oz pours from a 750 ml bottle |
| Wine by the bottle | 30 to 45% | Sliding scale, 2.2 to 3.3x | Higher multiple on cheap bottles, lower on expensive ones |
| Non-alcoholic (mocktails, sodas, coffee) | 10 to 20% | 5 to 8x | The highest margin on the list; do not give it away |
Two rules keep this honest. First, price the build, not the bottle. A margarita is tequila, triple sec, lime juice, agave, salt, a lime wheel and the ice, and the juice and garnish alone are 40 to 60 cents. Second, round to the price point the market expects and then check the percent, not the other way round. A $14 cocktail that costs $2.80 is 20 percent. A $13 cocktail that costs the same is 21.5 percent. Both are fine. A $9 cocktail that costs $2.80 is 31 percent and is subsidizing every guest who orders it.
The traditional rule is that the first glass pays for the bottle. A 750 ml bottle holds about 25 ounces, which is five 5-ounce pours. If the bottle costs $12, a $12 glass price means the first pour covers the bottle and the other four are margin. That is a 20 percent pour cost on paper.
In practice it is never 20 percent, because open bottles spoil. A bottle opened on Tuesday and poured once is three glasses of waste by Friday. Realistic by-the-glass pour cost is 25 to 35 percent once waste is counted, which is why the list should be short (six to ten wines by the glass), the pours should be measured, open bottles should be dated and preserved, and anything not moving should come off at the next print. Our wine by the glass pricing guide walks through pours per bottle, the pricing formula with waste built in and a calculator for your list.
By-the-glass math on a $12 bottle
Five pours at $12 = $60 of sales from a $12 bottle: 20 percent pour cost if every ounce sells.
Four pours sold, one wasted: $48 of sales from a $12 bottle: 25 percent.
Three pours sold, two wasted: $36 of sales: 33 percent.
The difference between a glass program at 22 percent and one at 33 is not pricing. It is how many bottles get poured all the way down.
Marking every bottle up the same multiple is the most common wine list mistake. A 3x markup puts a $10 bottle at $30, which guests accept, and a $100 bottle at $300, which nobody buys. The bottle sits in the cellar, which is cash on a shelf earning nothing. A sliding scale takes a higher percent margin on cheap bottles and a lower percent, but far more dollars, on expensive ones.
| Bottle cost | Multiple | List price | Gross margin per bottle | Wine cost % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $8 | 3.3x | $26 | $18 | 31% |
| $15 | 3.0x | $45 | $30 | 33% |
| $30 | 2.6x | $78 | $48 | 38% |
| $60 | 2.3x | $138 | $78 | 43% |
| $120 | 2.0x | $240 | $120 | 50% |
The $120 bottle at 50 percent wine cost makes $120 of gross margin, more than four of the $8 bottles. Percent margin is how you check the list; dollar margin is how you pay the rent. Build the list so the second-cheapest bottle in each section is the one you most want to sell, because that is the one most tables pick.
Cocktails are where the most margin is made and the most is lost, because they are the only drinks where the recipe, not the bottle, decides the cost. Cost every drink on the list the way a kitchen costs a plate, and re-cost when a spirit price moves.
House margarita, 2 oz tequila
Tequila 2 oz at $0.71 = $1.42. Triple sec 0.75 oz at $0.40 = $0.30. Lime juice 1 oz = $0.35. Agave 0.5 oz = $0.08. Lime wheel, salt, ice = $0.20. Waste 5% = $0.12.
Build cost: $2.47. At $12: 20.6 percent. At $14: 17.6 percent. At $10: 24.7 percent.
The same drink with a premium tequila at $1.40 an ounce costs $3.85 and needs a $17 to $19 price to hold 20 to 22 percent.
Batch what can be batched. Pre-mixing the non-spirit part of a high-volume cocktail cuts the make time in half, makes the pour consistent and lets a barback do the prep. The spirit still gets measured at service. A 90-second margarita at 8 p.m. on a Friday is 90 seconds of bartender labor on every drink; a 30-second one is sales per labor hour.
Pour cost tells you how well you buy and pour. Mix tells you how much you sell, and mix is usually the bigger number. Two metrics to put on the weekly sheet:
What moves the mix, in the order we have seen it work:
Five free calculators turn these guides into results in a few minutes: prime cost, food cost, labor cost, break-even and pour cost. Each one shows the gap to the benchmark for your concept in dollars a year. No signup.
Open the free calculators See the benchmarksEvery bottle on the back bar is inventory, training and a chance of variance. A neighborhood bar needs 40 to 60 spirits, a cocktail bar 80 to 120, and the top 20 do 80 percent of the volume in either case. Audit the list quarterly: anything that has not moved in 90 days comes off or gets a feature.
Set a par for every item from actual usage with a cushion to the next delivery, and order to par from the count, not from the shelf. The bar inventory guide covers the count sheet and the usage formula. A bar that orders to par carries 20 to 35 days of inventory. One that orders by feel carries 50 and still runs out of the well tequila on Saturday.
A beverage program can be priced perfectly and still lose three points a week to over-pouring, giveaways and theft. The controls are weekly, and they take about two hours.
Put the four numbers on the manager log every Monday: pour cost, variance, beverage mix and attachment rate. A program that watches those four will hold its margin through price increases, staff turnover and a slow quarter. The pour cost calculator prices any drink from bottle cost and finds what the monthly variance is costing.
Every guide on this site is cut from a workbook or playbook we built for real operations. The paid versions hold the complete templates, formulas and training material, one-time purchase, Excel and Google Sheets.
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How to run a bar count in under an hour, plus a usage and variance worksheet and the pour cost bands. Two printable pages.
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Download the PDFMeasured as pour cost, spirits usually run 15 to 22 percent of their sales, draft beer 18 to 24, bottled beer 22 to 28, wine by the glass 25 to 35 and wine by the bottle 30 to 45. Blended across a full service bar that is 18 to 24 percent, meaning 76 to 82 cents of every beverage dollar is gross margin before labor.
On a sliding scale, not a flat multiple. Cheap bottles carry a higher multiple (around 3 to 3.3 times cost) and expensive bottles a lower one (2 to 2.3 times), so the list stays sellable at the top and the dollar margin per bottle still rises with price. A $120 bottle at 2x makes $120 of margin, more than four $8 bottles at 3.3x.
Five 5-ounce pours from a standard 750 ml bottle, which holds about 25.4 ounces. Price the glass so one pour covers the bottle cost, then expect a 25 to 35 percent real pour cost after open-bottle waste, which is why a by-the-glass list should be short and dated.
Cost every ingredient per ounce (bottle cost divided by ounces), multiply by the recipe quantity, add juice, modifiers, garnish and ice, add about 5 percent for spillage, and divide the total build cost by the menu price. A house margarita with 2 ounces of well tequila usually costs $2.25 to $2.75 to build and should sell for $12 to $14 to hold 18 to 22 percent.
Full service restaurants usually run 20 to 30 percent of sales from beverage, bar-led concepts 55 to 75 percent and fine dining 30 to 40. Each point of mix that moves from food to beverage lowers blended cost of goods, because beverage costs 18 to 24 percent against 28 to 34 for food. Attachment rate (the share of checks with a beverage) is the number that moves it.
Variance is the gap between the pour cost the POS says you should have (theoretical, from recipes and sales) and the pour cost the inventory count says you actually have. Within one to two points is normal. Three points or more means over-pouring, unrecorded comps or theft, and the POS by category and shift usually shows where.
