Keg Profit Calculator
A keg looks like easy money until you count the foam. Between line cleaning, over-poured heads and the cloudy last gallon, a half-barrel rarely yields its theoretical 124 pints, so this calculator applies your waste percentage before any money math: enter the keg, the serving size and the pint price to see servings, revenue, net profit, margin, markup and the break-even price, or switch to the price setter and enter a target margin to get the price you must charge.
Real-world draft yield is typically 5 to 15% below the theoretical volume because of foam, line cleaning, and the final cloudy gallon.
Results
Quick Answer
A half-barrel keg (1,984 oz) bought for $120 with $30 of extras, poured as 16 oz pints at 8% waste and sold at $6, yields 114 servings, $684.00 of revenue and $534.00 of net profit: a 78.07% margin, a 356.00% markup and a break-even price of $1.32 per pint. To hit a 75% margin on the same keg, the price setter says you must charge $5.26 per serving. The calculator above is pre-filled with this exact keg.
Key takeaways
- Waste comes off first. At 8% loss a half-barrel pours 114 pints, not 124, and every money figure follows from the smaller count.
- Margin and markup are not interchangeable: the same $534 profit is 78.07% of the price and 356.00% of the cost.
- The break-even price ($1.32 here) is the floor under every pricing decision. Anything above it is margin; anything below it loses money on the keg before overheads.
- A refundable keg deposit is not a cost. Leave it out unless you routinely lose deposits.
- Quick Answer
- How to use the keg profit calculator
- The keg profit formulas
- Worked example: a $120 half-barrel at $6 a pint
- Keg sizes and realistic yields
- Margin, markup and pour cost: three readings of one keg
- What competing calculators miss
- Frequently asked questions
- Add This Calculator to Your Website
- References
How to use the keg profit calculator
Use Keg profit mode to test a price you already charge, and Price setter mode to work backwards from the margin you want. Results stay hidden until you click Calculate, and switching modes hides the previous results.
- Pick the keg size. Half barrel, quarter barrel, sixth barrel and 50 liter presets carry their legal fill in ounces. Choose Custom size for anything else, such as a 640 oz Cornelius keg, and type the volume in.
- Set the serving size and waste. The serving is the beer in the glass, not the glass itself: a pint glass under a normal head holds about 14 to 14.5 oz. Waste covers foam, line cleaning, over-pours and the last cloudy gallon; 8 to 10% is a fair starting point for a balanced system.
- Enter the money. Keg profit mode wants the keg purchase cost, the extra costs (enter 0 if there are none, but not blank) and the selling price per serving, which must be above zero. Price setter mode wants one total cost figure and a target margin above 0 and below 100.
- Read all eight lines, not just the profit. Profit per serving tells you what each pour earns, margin and markup frame it two different ways, and the break-even price is the number your menu price must clear.
For beer sold by the bottle, can or batch rather than by the keg, the beer profit calculator runs the same margin and markup logic per serving with its own keg helper, fixed costs and a sellable-pints adjustment. If you are costing a brew from ingredients upward, the beer cost calculator builds the cost per serving that belongs in the cost fields here.
The keg profit formulas
Every figure in the results comes from five short formulas, and the waste percentage is applied before any of the money math. That order is the whole point: profit calculated on theoretical servings is profit you will never see.
Revenue = Servings × Price per serving
Total cost = Keg cost + Extra costs
Net profit = Revenue − Total cost
Margin = Net profit ÷ Revenue × 100
Markup = Net profit ÷ Total cost × 100
Break-even price = Total cost ÷ Servings
Price setter: required price = (Total cost ÷ Servings) ÷ (1 − Target margin ÷ 100)
Servings are rounded down with floor, because a keg that yields 114.08 pours on paper pours 114 in the glass. The price setter is the margin formula rearranged: if cost per serving is $1.32 and you want to keep 75 cents of every dollar, the price has to be $1.32 divided by the 25 cents you are willing to spend, which is $5.26. That is also why a 100% margin is impossible: it would divide by zero. The Brewers Association guidance on keg handling for service staff covers the dispense side of the same problem, the cleaning, pressure and pouring habits that decide whether your waste figure is 5% or 20%.
Worked example: a $120 half-barrel at $6 a pint
The pre-filled run is a standard house keg: half barrel, $120 to buy, $30 of CO2, cups and ice, 16 oz servings, 8% waste, $6 a pint. Here is every line the calculator returns, plus the price-setter run on the same keg.
| Result line | Keg profit mode | Price setter (75% margin) |
|---|---|---|
| Servings per keg | 114 servings | 114 servings |
| Revenue | $684.00 | $600.00 at target price |
| Total cost | $150.00 ($1.32 per serving) | $150.00 ($1.32 per serving) |
| Net profit | $534.00 | $450.00 |
| Per serving | $4.68 profit | $5.26 required price |
| Margin / markup | 78.07% / 356.00% | 75.00% / 300.00% equivalent |
| Break-even price | $1.32 | $1.32 |
Split the $684 of revenue and the shape of a keg deal is obvious: about 22 cents of every dollar goes back out as cost, and about 78 cents stays as keg-level profit before rent, labor and other overheads.
The price setter earns its keep when the keg changes. A craft sixth barrel that costs more per ounce can need a $7 or $8 pour to hold the same margin, and finding that out from the tool beats finding it out from a month of thin takings. Note what the setter does at extreme targets, too: ask for a 99.99% margin on this same keg and the required price comes out at $13,157.89 a pint, which is the math telling you the target, not the keg, is the problem.
Keg sizes and realistic yields
A half-barrel holds 1,984 ounces and pours 124 theoretical pints; every smaller format scales from the same 31 gallon brewery barrel. Real yields run below the theory at any honest waste figure, and the gap widens as the keg gets smaller because the fixed losses (line volume, the cloudy heel) barely shrink.
| Keg | Volume | Theoretical 16 oz pints | Servings at 8% waste |
|---|---|---|---|
| Half barrel | 1,984 oz (15.5 gal) | 124 | 114 |
| Quarter barrel (pony) | 992 oz (7.75 gal) | 62 | 57 |
| Sixth barrel (sixtel) | 661 oz (5.16 gal) | 41 | 38 |
| 50 liter import | 1,690 oz (13.2 gal) | 105 | 97 |
| Cornelius (enter as Custom) | 640 oz (5 gal) | 40 | 36 |
Every servings figure in the right-hand column is a run of the calculator above at 8% waste with 16 oz servings, not a rule of thumb. Drop the serving to 12 oz and the same half-barrel pours 152 servings at 8% waste, which is why serving size is an input and not a footnote. For events rather than bars, the number of drinks calculator works out how many servings a guest list needs, and the drink size calculator converts between pour sizes when the glassware changes.
Margin, markup and pour cost: three readings of one keg
The worked-example keg reads three different ways depending on which percentage you quote, and confusing them is the most common keg pricing mistake. Margin divides profit by price, markup divides profit by cost, and pour cost divides cost by price, so margin and pour cost always add up to 100%.
Pour cost is the language most bar pricing guides use: Toast's keg cost guide puts profitable draft pour cost at roughly 18 to 22%, with craft lines running higher at 20 to 26%, and the Backbar Academy draft pricing guide works the same 20% example through a full keg. The worked example here, at 21.93%, sits right at the top of that band, which is honest for a $120 keg with $30 of extras loaded onto it. If a single percentage is all you need to check, the 20 percent margin calculator isolates the margin side of the same relationship.
Two cautions belong with these numbers. First, all three percentages here are keg-level: they count the keg and its direct extras, not rent, wages, glassware breakage or card fees, so a 78% keg margin can still be a thin month. Second, the margin the result badge calls strong (70% and up) is a draft-beer yardstick, not a business verdict; wine, spirits and food each carry their own normal bands.
What competing calculators miss
Most tools ranking for keg and beer profit either skip the keg entirely or skip the waste, and the one true pricing rival makes a quiet formula error:
- CalculatorsHub Draft Price Calculator: the closest pricing rival, but its worked example applies a markup while calling it a margin: it multiplies cost by (1 + 0.30) for a stated 30% margin, which actually delivers a 23.08% margin. It also works from a round 1,900 usable ounces with no serving-size floor, so its servings never match what a keg pours. This page's price setter divides by (1 − margin), which is the margin formula, and floors the servings.
- BraveCalculator Beer Profit Calculator: honest per-pint math ((price − cost) × pints sold), but the keg is left to the reader: its own FAQ tells you to divide the keg cost and volume yourself to get a cost per pint. No yield, no waste, no break-even.
- AreaCalculators and CalculatorsHub Beer Profit: revenue minus cost over typed-in quantities, with fixed costs in one case. Useful bookkeeping, but nothing in either tool knows what a keg is, so foam and line loss never enter the numbers.
- Toast, Backbar and Bar-i pricing guides: strong pour-cost teaching (18 to 22% targets, 14.5 oz real pours), but the worked examples are static text with round numbers chosen by the author, not a tool that runs your keg, your waste and your price.
- The gap this page fills: waste applied before the money, floored servings, margin and markup side by side, a break-even floor on every run, and a price setter that solves the reverse problem with the correct margin formula, all on one page.
Frequently asked questions
The theoretical count is 124 sixteen-ounce pints from 1,984 ounces, but a real keg pours fewer. After 5 to 15% waste from foam, line cleaning, over-pours and the cloudy final gallon, most bars land between about 105 and 117 pints, and this calculator uses 114 pints at the 8% waste in the worked example. If your system is warm or over-pressured, waste can run higher, so measure your own loss over a few kegs and use that figure.
Margin is profit divided by the selling price, while markup is profit divided by the cost. In the worked example, a $534 profit on $684 of revenue is a 78.07% margin, and the same $534 on a $150 cost is a 356.00% markup. The two numbers describe the same keg, so a quote that sounds better is not necessarily a better deal; check which base the percentage uses.
Include CO2, cups, ice and anything else that is consumed keg by keg, either in extra costs or in the total cost field of the price setter. Labor is harder to allocate fairly, so most bars leave it out of the per-keg figure and cover it from the margin instead. Whatever you choose, be consistent: a margin that looks strong only because costs were left out will not survive the month-end accounts.
You cannot sell a partial pint, so the servings count is rounded down to the last whole serving the keg can actually pour. The worked example produces 114.08 servings on paper, and the tool counts 114. Rounding down slightly understates revenue instead of overstating it, which is the safer direction for pricing.
At keg level, draft beer is the highest-margin product in most bars: industry pricing guides commonly target about a 20% pour cost, which is the same as an 80% margin on the serving, and craft lines often run at 20 to 26% pour cost. Your own target should sit below that ceiling once rent, labor and other overheads are counted, because the keg-level margin in this tool is before those costs.
Yes. The math only cares about volume, servings and money, not about what is in the keg. Enter the keg volume in ounces, your serving size, the waste you realistically lose and your costs, and the servings, margin and break-even figures follow the same formulas. A 5 ounce wine pour from a sixth barrel is a common taproom setup.
A refundable deposit is not a cost, because you get it back when the empty keg goes back, so leave it out of both cost fields. If your venue regularly loses deposits, add the expected loss per keg to extra costs so the break-even price reflects it. Never add the full deposit as a routine cost, or every keg will look far less profitable than it is.
Yes, with one adjustment: the tool requires a selling price above zero, so a free party needs a stand-in price. Enter any price to run the keg, then read the Total cost line, which shows the full cost and the cost per serving in parentheses. If you charge a ticket or cup price, enter that as the price and the net profit line becomes your event profit.
A 0% margin is just the break-even price, which Keg profit mode already reports on every run, and a 100% margin would require an infinite price because the cost per serving is divided by what is left after the margin. The price setter therefore accepts any margin above 0 and below 100. At very high margins the required price climbs fast: the worked example keg needs $13,157.89 per pint at a 99.99% margin.
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References
- Brewers Association. Keg Handling Tips for Beer Service Staff. Accessed October 22, 2026.
- Brewers Association. How to Prevent Injury in Bars and Taprooms (draught line safety and the Draught Beer Quality Manual). Accessed October 22, 2026.
- Toast. Keg Costs 101: What You Need to Know Before You Buy. Accessed October 22, 2026.
- Backbar Academy. How to Price Draft and Bottled Beer. Accessed October 22, 2026.
- Bar-i. The Ultimate Guide to Profitable Draft Beer Pricing. Accessed October 22, 2026.
- mise. Pour Cost Calculator: Cost per Pour and Drink Price. Accessed October 22, 2026.