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Keg Yield, Pours and Pour Cost Calculator
Enter your keg cost, keg size, pour size, menu price and loss rate and see what one keg actually returns behind the bar.
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Draft Line Cleaning Time and Labor Planner
Set your line count, minutes per line and cycle length to see what clean draft lines cost your taproom in hours and payroll every year.
Line cleaning is the one job in a taproom that never gets easier and never gets noticed when it is done right. Nobody thanks you for a pale ale that tastes like pale ale, but every guest notices the buttery pour on handle nine. This planner puts a number on the work so it can be scheduled and budgeted like the recurring shift it is, rather than squeezed into whatever hour nobody claimed.
The default assumes twenty lines, eight minutes of hands on work each, half an hour of setup and teardown for the pump and caustic, and a fourteen day cycle. Change the interval to twenty one or twenty eight days and watch how little labor you actually save, which is the argument worth having with anyone who wants to stretch the schedule.
Your result
Minutes per full cleaning
190
Hands on minutes for one pass through every line in the building.
Cleanings per year
26.1
How many full cleanings that interval produces over a year.
Labor hours per year
82.6
Total hours the cleaning cycle takes off your schedule annually.
Annual labor cost
$2,147
Payroll cost of that cleaning time at the rate you entered.
Chemicals and replacement line are extra, but labor is the part that has to come out of somebody's shift.
Why the interval matters more than the technique
Two weeks is the interval most US breweries expect from accounts pouring their beer, and it is what draft quality guidance from the trade has been built around for years. Stretching to three or four weeks does not remove labor so much as move it. Contact time goes up, faucets need harder teardown work, beer stone builds where the caustic no longer reaches, and eventually you are pulling and replacing line that should have lasted years.
Run the numbers at fourteen days and then at twenty eight. The hours you save are smaller than most owners expect, and the price of those hours is beer that tastes faintly like the last three beers on that handle. That is the whole argument, and this planner is how you win it with a spreadsheet instead of a speech.
Turning hours into a schedule that holds
The annual figure is useful for a budget conversation and useless for a Tuesday. Take the minutes per cycle instead, divide by how many people you can put on the job, and you have the length of the shift you actually have to schedule, usually a morning before doors with the cooler propped and a pump running.
Write it into the schedule as a named shift with a person attached, the same way you schedule a brew day. Taprooms that treat line cleaning as something to fit in around service are the ones with a two month gap in the log and a mystery butyric note in the pilsner that nobody can explain to the brewer.
Questions about this calculator
How long does one draft line take to clean?
Most crews budget five to ten minutes per line for a caustic recirculation once the pump is set up, plus faucet teardown. Long runs from a walk in cooler take longer than short direct draw lines behind the bar. Time your own crew for one session and enter the real figure.
Should I include acid cleanings in this estimate?
Model your routine caustic cycle first, then account for acid by shortening the interval slightly or adding a minute per line. Acid cleaning handles beer stone and is typically done a few times a year rather than every two weeks. Keeping the two separate makes the planner easier to reason about.
Is it cheaper to hire a line cleaning service?
Compare the hourly figure here against a quoted rate for your line count. Services often win for taprooms with long runs, many handles, or nobody on staff who wants the job. Doing it in house wins when a cellar person is already on payroll during those morning hours.
More free tools and working documents
Working document
The Keg Changeover and Menu Sync Checklist
Four stages for staging, swapping and publishing a keg change without a bad pour or a menu that lies to the table by the window.
That figure assumes the tap list is honest
The pours you just counted assume nobody pours a glass of a beer that has already blown, and the labor hours assume the cleaning gets logged the day it happens. TapListLive records the change once at the coupler and updates every menu surface from that one action. Twenty minutes on a call is enough to tell whether it fits your cellar routine.