How to price a cocktail menu with pour-cost math

Pricing a cocktail menu is not a once-a-year creative exercise. Bottle costs move, recipes drift, and a drink that was healthy last spring can sit above your pour-cost band by fall without anyone noticing. The fix is a short, repeatable loop: current cost per serving, a stated target band, a corrected price, and a what-if check before you print.

Start with cost per serving. For each cocktail, sum ingredient cost from current bottle prices and recipe ounces. If invoice prices are stale, the pour-cost percentage is fiction. ExactPour keeps bottle costs current from supplier invoices; if you are still on spreadsheets, update high-velocity SKUs from the last delivery before you touch menu prices.

Pick a pour-cost band that matches your concept. ExactPour's default cocktail hypothesis is 18–24%, which is a coaching range, not a law. A high-volume sports bar and a craft cocktail room can both be healthy at different bands. Write the band down so the team argues about drinks against a shared rule instead of gut feel.

Flag drinks above the band. Sort by weekly sales volume so you fix the drinks that move money first. A fifty-cent correction on a top seller usually matters more than a dramatic change on a slow specialty. Suggested prices should come from arithmetic (the price that returns pour cost to the top of the band, rounded to a menu-friendly increment), not from a language model inventing a number.

Run a what-if before you commit. Hold volume flat and look at weekly, monthly, and annual margin impact. Flat volume is a ceiling assumption, say so explicitly. Guest elasticity is your judgment about the room; the math's job is to show what the margin does if guests keep ordering at the same rate.

Correct small and often. Gradual fifty-cent moves track costs without shocking regulars. Waiting two years and jumping a dollar-fifty invites the scrutiny you were avoiding. Pair pricing reviews with invoice price watching so a supplier increase on a base spirit surfaces the same week, not at the next menu meeting.

Sequence the first week: update costs on your top twenty sellers, compute pour cost, sort by monthly margin impact, pick two or three corrections, simulate them, then reprint or update the POS. Companion pages: pour cost control and how to calculate pour cost.

Common failure modes: pricing from catalog defaults instead of your negotiated bottle cost; ignoring garnish and modifiers; updating the menu without updating the POS price the variance math sees; and treating a band as sacred when mix or concept changed. Re-baseline the band after a major menu rewrite.

ExactPour's price and margin copilot and what-if simulator exist to make this loop minutes, not a weekend project. The numbers stay deterministic, AI only summarizes. If you want peer context later, that is a separate opt-in product; pricing decisions should still start from your recipes and your invoices.

For the wider category checklist, counting, variance, invoices, trial design, start at bar inventory software. Pricing is only as honest as the inventory and cost inputs underneath it.

Worked example: a $14 cocktail with $3.50 recipe cost sits at 25% pour cost. If your cocktail band tops out at 22%, the price that returns you to 22% is about $15.90, which you will likely round to $16. Hold volume flat and annualize the extra $2 on weekly units. That is the conversation with ownership, not a vibe about what guests will pay.

Garnish and modifiers matter more than operators admit. A house cocktail with three juices and a foam can carry as much cost as the base spirit. If those ingredients are not on the recipe, period pour cost will look worse than recipe cost and the team will argue about over-pouring that is actually missing lines.

POS price and menu price must match the math. Updating a chalkboard and leaving Square on last year's price makes variance and pour cost lie in opposite directions. Sequence reprints with POS updates the same day.

When a supplier increase hits a well brand, reprice the drinks that use it before you redesign the whole list. ExactPour's price watchdog and what-if views exist to make that a same-week job. Companion glossary: recipe cost and pour cost band.