Free Tool

Keg Cost Calculator

Enter the keg cost, the size, your pour, and the menu price. You get cost per pint, pours per keg, your draft pour cost, and the profit a full keg makes at your price.

Draft pour cost
Cost per pour
Pours per keg
Profit per keg

This is the full keg, every ounce sold clean. You never get all of it. The foam is the leak, and it comes straight out of these pints.

What Good Looks Like

What a keg should pour.

The full number is simple math. The real number is what you actually sell after foam and waste take their cut, and that is where the money hides. These are the counts good operators run their kegs against every week.

KegFull pints, 16 ozAfter foam and waste
Half barrel, 15.5 gal12495 to 115
Quarter barrel, 7.75 gal6248 to 57
Sixtel, 5.16 gal4131 to 38
The gap is real money124 should pour95 on a bad system

Twenty-nine pints off one half barrel, at six dollars a pint, is 174 dollars of beer you paid for and poured down the drain, on one keg. Bar Cop counts what the keg should have poured against what your sales say it did, and prices that gap in dollars, so you know the line needs attention before the month does.

The Math

How cost per pint is calculated.

Step One

Pours per keg

Divide the keg size in ounces by your pour. A half barrel is 15.5 gallons, which is 1,984 ounces, so at a 16 ounce pint you get 124 pints on paper. Drop to a 14 ounce pour and the same keg gives you 142, and your cost per pint falls right along with it.

Step Two

Cost per pour

Divide the keg cost by pours per keg. A 180 dollar half barrel over 124 pints is about a dollar 45 a pint. Against a 6 dollar menu price that is a 24 percent pour cost, right where draft should sit. A pricier keg or a cheaper pour moves it from there.

The Catch

You never get 124

This math assumes every ounce pours into a glass and gets sold. It does not. Foam, dumped pints, a warm line, a slow night that ends in a blown keg. The real yield comes from counting the keg against what you sold. The difference is the leak.

See Your Real Number

Bar Cop counts the foam.