How to Price Drinks and Cocktails

Price a drink by dividing its pour cost — the cost of the liquor, mixers, and garnish in the glass — by your target pour-cost percentage, usually 18–24% for cocktails, 20–30% for beer and wine. A $2.50 cocktail pour at a 20% target prices at $12.50. Drinks are the highest-margin sales in your restaurant, so getting their pricing right moves your bottom line faster than almost anything on the food menu.

The pour-cost formula

Pour cost is the drink equivalent of food cost. The math is simple:

Menu price = total pour cost ÷ target pour-cost %

Total pour cost is everything in the glass: the spirits (priced per ounce from the bottle), mixers, juice, garnish, and any consistent waste. Add it up, divide by your target, and round to a clean price point.

The calculator above does this for every drink — enter bottle cost and size, and it computes cost per ounce, pour cost, and a target price automatically.

Cost per ounce is the foundation

Every spirit price starts with cost per ounce. Take the bottle cost, divide by the bottle's total ounces (a 750 ml bottle holds about 25.4 oz; a liter holds 33.8 oz), and you have your per-ounce cost. A $24 bottle of well vodka is about $0.94 per ounce, so a 1.5 oz pour costs you $1.42 in spirit alone. The same cost-per-ounce math you use for bulk food applies straight to the bar.

Price each category to its own target

Different drink categories carry different targets because guests judge their value differently.

• Cocktails: 18–24%. The highest-margin category and the one guests expect to pay a premium for. Craft builds justify craft prices.
• Beer: 20–28%. Draft usually beats bottles on margin. Price craft and import above domestic.
• Wine: 20–35%. By-the-glass should recover most of the bottle cost in two to three pours. Markup is often 2.5–3x wholesale.
• Non-alcoholic: 10–18%. Sodas, coffee, and mocktails are your very best margins — a near-free ingredient at a real price.

Watch over-pouring, the silent leak

Your pricing only holds if your pours are accurate. A bartender who free-pours 2 oz where the recipe says 1.5 quietly turns a 20% pour cost into 27% — and you never see it on the menu. Jiggers, portioned pour spouts, and standardized recipes protect the margins your pricing assumes. This is portion control for the bar, and it's worth real money.

Takeaway: Price every drink from its pour cost against a category target — roughly 20% for cocktails, higher for wine, lower for soda. Then protect those margins with measured pours, because a heavy hand erases the profit your menu price promised.

Track pour cost like food cost

Priced right and poured right, the bar is your most profitable square footage. But you only know it's holding if you compare theoretical pour cost to what actually rings up. Cobblestone POS tracks drink sales, modifiers, and margins alongside your food menu for free — no monthly fee versus roughly $470+/mo for a comparable Toast setup — so a creeping pour cost shows up before it eats a month of profit. Ask its AI assistant, Daisy, for your bar's margin by category and you'll spot the leak fast.

Reprice whenever a distributor raises a bottle cost. Small, steady adjustments beat a big shock, and your best-margin category deserves the attention.