Pour cost calculator
Pour cost is the cost of a drink divided by its selling price excluding VAT. Work from a cost per millilitre: a 70cl bottle at £18.50 is £0.0264 per ml, so a 50ml measure costs £1.32 before garnish. This calculator adds the garnish, strips the VAT, and lets you model what free pouring is actually costing you.
Cost per drink
£1.67
Pour cost
18.2%
Gross profit, cash
£7.50
Spirit £1.32 + extras £0.35. Net selling price after 20% VAT: £9.17. Cost per ml: £0.03.
Now drag the overpour slider. Free pouring instead of jiggering typically adds 10–25%, and it is almost always the largest leak on a bar.
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The overpour is the whole game
Every other number on a bar cost sheet is rounding error next to this one. Free pouring instead of jiggering adds somewhere between 10% and 25% to spirit usage — and spirit is your largest cost line. A 50ml spec poured at 58ml is a 16% overpour, which quietly turns a 14-drink bottle into a 12-drink bottle.
Drag the slider and watch the gross profit move. That gap is not theft and it is not carelessness — nobody can eyeball 50ml consistently through a Saturday. It is why jiggers exist.
What most bars leave out
- Garnish — 12–20p a drink, almost never in the recipe
- In-house syrups costed per batch instead of per yield
- Bitters and dashes, which are a real volume
- Ice, and the remakes bad ice causes
- Glass breakage
Questions
- How do you calculate pour cost?
- Divide the bottle cost by the bottle size to get a cost per millilitre, multiply by your measure, then add garnish and syrups. Divide that total by the selling price excluding VAT. A 70cl bottle at £18.50 is £0.0264 per ml, so a 50ml measure costs £1.32 before garnish.
- What is a good pour cost percentage?
- Most UK bars target 18–25% on spirits, though cocktails with fresh ingredients and house syrups often run higher. Judge drinks on cash gross profit as well: a cocktail at 28% returning £8 beats a simple spirit and mixer at 15% returning £4.
- Why does the overpour slider matter so much?
- Because free pouring instead of jiggering typically adds 10–25% to spirit usage, which dwarfs every other line on a bar cost sheet. A 50ml spec poured at 58ml is a 16% overpour on your single largest cost, and it turns a 24-drink bottle into a 21-drink bottle.
- What do most bars forget to include?
- Garnish, ice, in-house syrups costed at yield rather than per batch, bitters and dashes, and glass breakage. Individually small, but across a few hundred drinks a week they are the difference between the pour cost you think you run and the one your stocktake shows.
This is the theory. Your stocktake is the truth.
A pour cost tells you what a drink should cost. The gap between that and what your stocktake says you used is where bar profit actually goes. David AI holds your specs and reports that gap in cash, weekly.