How to cost a cocktail (including the bits everyone forgets)

Bar margin looks simple until you actually measure it. Spirit is cheap per millilitre and the sell price is high, so cocktails feel safe — which is exactly why the leakage goes unnoticed for years.

Get to a cost per millilitre

A 70cl bottle of gin at £18.50 ex-VAT is 700ml, so £0.0264 per ml. A 50ml measure costs £1.32. Do this once per bottle and every drink using it becomes arithmetic.

The forgotten costs

• Garnish. A dehydrated citrus wheel is 12–20p. Across 200 drinks a week that is real money, and it is almost never in the recipe.
• Ice. It has a cost — the machine, the water, the energy — and more importantly, ice made badly means more dilution and more remakes.
• Syrups and cordials made in-house. Cost the sugar, the fruit and the labour, then cost the yield, not the batch.
• Bitters and rinses. Small per drink, but a dash is a real volume and should be specced.
• The glass. Not a per-drink cost until you count breakage, which for a busy bar is far from nothing.

Shrinkage: the number that separates theory from reality

Free pouring instead of jiggering adds somewhere between 10% and 25% to spirit usage — a 50ml spec poured at 58ml is a 16% overpour on your single largest cost line. Add spillage, staff drinks, comps and the last inch nobody logs, and the gap between what your recipes say you used and what the stocktake says you used is where bar profit goes.

1. Spec every cocktail and print the specs where the team can see them.
2. Jigger everything, including the things that feel obvious.
3. Log comps and wastage at the moment they happen, not at the end of the week from memory.
4. Count weekly and read the variance in cash, by line.

A 2% variance on a busy bar's spirit spend is not a rounding error. It is somebody's wages.

FoxEra holds cocktail specs alongside food recipes, so bar and kitchen variance sit in one report rather than two spreadsheets that disagree.