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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.
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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.
A half barrel holds 1,984 ounces and no taproom in America sells all of them. Between the foam on a fresh coupling, the pull that clears a warm line, tasters at the bar, staff samples and the heel that spits at blowout, a real keg gives up a meaningful slice before it ever reaches a guest. This calculator turns your own loss rate into pours, revenue and pour cost so you can argue about a number instead of a feeling.
It works for any keg format. Change the ounces field for sixtels, 50 liter imports or a one sixth barrel guest cider, and change the pour size to whatever your crew actually serves rather than what the glass could hold at the brim. The two fields that move the answer most are pour size and loss rate, which is why both belong to bartender habits rather than to purchasing.
Your result
Sellable ounces per keg
1,746
What is left after foam, tasters and the blowout heel come out.
Pours you can sell
109
Full glasses at your pour size, rounded down to whole pours.
Menu revenue per keg
$872
Sales one keg produces at that price and that loss rate.
Pour cost, percent of sales
18.9%
Beer cost measured against the sales that keg actually generates.
Pour size swings this harder than price does, so measure how your crew really fills a glass before you trust the answer.
Where the lost ounces actually go
The gap between 1,984 ounces and what you ring up is not one leak, it is six small ones. Foam on the first pour after a coupling, the pull that clears a warm line at open, tasters at the bar, staff samples, spillage on a rail with a fast bartender, and the heel you cannot serve when the keg starts spitting air. Each is small and none of them shows up in the register.
Most taprooms land somewhere between eight and eighteen percent depending on how well the system is balanced and how disciplined the crew is with tasters. If your calculated loss looks lower than that, you are probably not counting tasters. Follow one keg from tap to blowout each quarter, count what left the faucet against what was rung, and you will have your real number instead of a guess.
How to read the pour cost figure
Pour cost here is beer cost against the sales one keg produces, which is the figure that moves when you change glass size or menu price. It is not a full cost of goods number, because it ignores the cup, the CO2, the labor behind the bar and the federal and state excise tax on beer removed from your bonded area.
For house beer in a brewery taproom the number is usually low enough to hide sloppy habits. Compare it across handles instead of against an industry benchmark. The guest cider, the barrel aged pour served in a ten ounce snifter and the flagship in a pint all behave differently, and the thin ones are the handles worth watching every week.
Questions about this calculator
How many pours should I expect from a half barrel?
A half barrel holds 1,984 ounces, so a sixteen ounce pour with no loss would give 124 glasses. Real taprooms usually land somewhere near 105 to 115 once foam, tasters and the heel are counted. Enter your own loss rate above to get your number rather than the theoretical one.
Should I use the glass size or the real fill?
Use the real fill. A shaker pint holds sixteen ounces to the very brim and nobody serves it that way with a head on the beer. Pour four glasses the way your crew pours them, measure them, and enter that average instead.
Does this work for sixtels and 50 liter kegs?
Yes, just change the keg size field. A sixtel is 661 ounces and a 50 liter keg is roughly 1,690. Small formats often show a worse loss rate because the foam from each coupling is spread across far fewer pours.
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.