Maximizing Draft Beer Yield for Bar Owners: Boost Profits & Improve Quality

While anyone can open a can of beer or a bottle of beer at their house to make it , you can make almost any cocktail . You can get a bar at home if you have the right tools and the right ingredients . Very few people have a cake rater , so draft beer is kind of reserved for people when they go out to drink .

That happens to make it quite popular And because it's popular , draft beer can be a great moneymaker for most bars . While it can be a great moneymaker , there are also ways with draft beer to easily lose money .

So anytime we're thinking about draft beer , we have to make sure not only that we're doing it and that we're charging the right amount and that our costing is correct and all those sorts of things we've talked about in prior episodes , but you also have to just make sure that you're doing draft beer right , because if you do draft beer wrong , what you'll find is

that you're not making near as much money as you can . So draft beer is something that absolutely we have to pay attention to And absolutely we always have to try to do it properly .

Now , obviously , we should try to do everything properly in our bars , but draft beer has a lot of considerations and a lot of complications that we need to take into account that don't exist for other drinks that you serve in most bars , and the bottom line here is that for your draft program to be successful , not only do you need to be able to consistently

serve a high quality product , you also need to be able to serve that of the correct yield to protect your bottom line . When we think about draft beer , the first thing to consider is why is it so much harder than cans and bottles ? And the main reason there is that cans and bottles you're always going to get 100% perfect yield . Cans and bottles are easy .

They cost whatever they cost . You just sell them for the markup that you need to get And you're pretty much done . You don't have much opportunity to waste with cans and bottles , short of dropping one on the ground , spelling it something like that .

When it comes to draft beer , there's a huge opportunity for waste in your service , and the biggest form of waste you're going to face when it comes to draft beer is foam . Foam is the absolute enemy . Now we'll dive into here in a little bit what creates foam , how to combat foam , all that sort of great stuff .

Let's first by talking a little bit about what foam can do to you , because foam is what destroys your draft yield Anytime you see a bartender pouring foam off a glass down the drain to try to get a full beer , all that foam is beer that cannot be sold . All that foam is beer that's being poured down the drain .

Your money is literally being poured down the drain as the owner when you see a bartender pouring foam down a drain , so you want to minimize or completely eliminate any time that can happen .

With draft beer yields , a lot of bars are in the 70 to 80% yield range , and in the 70 to 80% yield range you're leaving approximately 50% of your potential for profit on the table . Where we want to be is more like 95% yield . I would love to say that most bars can get to 100 . And we'll talk about at the end .

There are some newer products , some different ways that you can pour draft beer . It can get you closer to that 100% , but generally speaking I've always aimed for 95% , because I think that's pretty achievable with standard draft faucets and a standard draft beer system .

And when we think about this in terms of money , the difference between a 70% yield and a 95% yield , if you sell 10 kegs a week , could be $75,000 a year . And let's break that down real quick because I know that seems like a huge number , but it's a very real number . So if you think about a keg , a standard keg is a half barrel in America .

Now there are in Europe , and with European beers you're going to run into leader sized kegs , and so that's a whole different conversation .

I know obviously it's slightly different math , but for the purposes of this conversation we're going to stick to the standard American barrel system , and a half barrel of beer which is considered a keg is 15.5 gallons , so the normal kegs you're used to saying are 15.5 gallons . Beer used to be sold in 31 gallon barrels and that's really not a thing anymore .

So in a 15.5 gallon half barrel or a keg , you're going to get roughly 132 pints at 100% yield , and I know some of you are going well , that sounds like a little more beer than is actually in there , because if you do the math , that's going to leave you with more than 15.5 gallons if you get 132 pints . The reason for this is all beers have some foam .

All beers should have a head . Now that head is about three quarters of an inch . You end up with the possibility to get up towards about 132 beers at 100% yield , and we can call that 130 just for the sake of argument .

Now if you have a 70% yield on 10 kegs , that cost you $150 and you sell each beer for $5 , versus you have a 95% yield on 10 kegs a week that cost you $150 , where you sell each beer for $5 , that is a difference of about $1,500 a week . So think about that When you see a lot of bars say you know I'm struggling , i just can't pay this or that .

What is $1,500 a week worth And in this case $1,500 a week sometimes is just the difference between some good training and maybe fixing the keg box a little bit , getting that pressure more in line , getting your temperature more in line , and we'll get into those factors here in a little bit . But the bottom line is that $1,500 a week is huge for most bars .

And if you say , well , i don't burn through 10 kegs a week , i go through five , okay , fine , $750 a week . $750 a week still by the end of the year is about $35,000 . An extra $35,000 in your pocket is the owner . Well , that could be new equipment for your bar . That could be all sorts of improvements , renovations .

That could also be a couple of really good vacations . Don't minimize the fact that a few hundred bucks a week adds up quick And in the case of draft beer we really are talking for most bars out there . We're leaving hundreds of dollars on the table each and every week and it adds up to thousands of dollars over the course of a year .

So it's really important that you get this stuff right .

And one of the main issues that a lot of bars have and this came about in the last couple , 10 , 15 years as craft beer really became popular is that many bars have too many beers on tap And we have all been to bars and are familiar with concepts that have 100 beers on tap and they move them and they're busy And that's great .

But I'm also aware of a lot of neighborhood bars that have 20 beers on tap and they don't sell through those kegs very quickly . And , at the end of the day , a keg that sits around forever , a keg that's plugged up to the CO2 fra , a keg where that beer sits in that line and it doesn't move forever , does nothing but hurt your yield .

And that actually happens from two main causes First one being that the keg is hooked up to the CO2 for an extended period of time . If that keg is not poured , you can end up with excess CO2 going into the beer , which will just ruin the beer .

It's essentially forced carbonating the beer above and beyond where the beer should be carbonated And that's going to cause excess foam and there's no way you can solve that . Once that happened .

And if you have beer sitting in the line , that beer is going to cause deposits in your line which form little bumps they call them beer stones And as you pour beer over that , that's also going to agitate it , cause excess CO2 to be released and cause more foam in your beer . So nothing is good about a beer that sits on a line for a long time .

And what that means is , if you're selling a lot of draft beer , great , you can have 20 , 30 , 40 lines . But if you're not selling through that many kegs , you don't need that many draft beer lines . So it's always worth considering do you have too many draft beer lines and is that causing you to lose money on draft ?

Now , i know a lot of you hear me say that and you're thinking but I need a variety , i need different things all the time on my draft lines . Well , great , rotate them . I can tell you right now , my bar , i had 12 draft lines . I ran half barrel kegs on some .

I ran the little five gallon pony kegs on some , and I would aim to rotate all my beers at least once every other week . So if I had a beer I'd sell through it . I'd put a totally different beer on .

That gave my customers a variety , that gave them options , that took care of providing a large beer selection , especially when most people are coming in you know two , three times a week they have all different beers they can try every time they come in , because something's always rotated And I didn't need more than 12 lines .

So consider rotating lines as opposed to having more lines , as a way to avoid keeping kegs on lines for too long . Because the other thing too and I kind of mentioned this with the cleaning of the lines , but it's also true that a beer that sits around for too long just goes bad . Let's be honest , beer goes bad over time .

So you don't want to serve people a bad product And to do that you need to sell through your beer , and either you rotate your beer or you have a volume that allows you to sell through a bunch of draft lines all the time .

But personally I would always err on the side of having fewer lines that you rotate more frequently than having more lines that don't move , because lines that don't move does not do anything And rotating beer provides guests variety , interest , excitement Plus .

If you rotate through a bunch of beer on a regular basis , you will get to a point , by collecting all the data on your beer what you're selling , when you're selling , why it's selling that you'll be able to very easily and quickly understand what your guests like , what they don't like , and better cater the beer that you're putting on your lines to suit your

guests . When it comes to draft beer systems , there are essentially two types , and I know if you already have a bar you're stuck with one or the other .

But it's always worth considering what you're using and why , and those two types are either going to be a long draw system , where you have kegs away from the bar , long draft lines that run from a walk in whether that's behind the bar directly , or in some cases , it can be dozens of yards , meters away from the bar or a keg box system .

A keg box system is essentially the kegerator . The kegs are right under the top sitting in a refrigerated box . A lot of people like the long draw systems , and , from a design aspect , the long draw systems do give you a lot more options , a lot more variety . You can put keg taps anywhere you want on your bar .

You don't need a big refrigerator unit behind your bar taking up space . I personally , though , prefer keg boxes . The reason I prefer keg boxes is that they are easier to maintain . They hold temperature better . There's a shorter line , so there's less opportunity for that line to get dirty . It moves more .

You just don't have all the issues that can exist with a long draw system in a keg box system . Now , ideally , if I was going to build a bar today , i would try to have a walk-in directly behind the wall of the back bar , so that I had kind of a combination of the two , i have my taps just punching straight through that wall .

So I have the line length of a keg box system combined with the benefit of not having that big cooler behind my bar that I would have if I used a keg box and getting all the benefits of the long draw system .

Let's be honest , unless you're building a bar now , if you own a bar or if you buy an existing bar , you're going to have whatever system they have . So you have to learn to adapt . I've used both .

I just really like the shorter lines because I think you have a lot less waste , especially when it comes to cleaning your keg lines , and we'll get into that here in a little bit .

But you have to consider what type of system you're going to use if you're going to build a bar and again , shorter lines is always better but that space of not having the keg boxes behind the bar , that extra space you get , can be very valuable , regardless of what kind of system you use

. When you're serving draft beer , there are three main enemies of your draft yield . That's going to be the temperature , pressure and cleanliness of your draft lines . When it comes to temperature , draft beer is really happy only in a very narrow band . You want your draft beer to be between 34 and 38 degrees .

Lower than 34 , you can get some ice , depending on if it's a low ABB beer . Over 38 , you start to get excess foam . Over 40 , you have so much excess CO2 being released in the beer as it's being poured that you will never get a good pour .

So anything over 40 degrees is going to drop your yields down to maybe 75% if you're lucky , but probably 70 , 60 , 50% . It can kill your entire profits by having beer being poured over 40 degrees . And really , again , you want to be under 38 . 34 to 38 range is the sweet spot for draft beer .

Now the way you maintain that temperature is by maintaining your refrigeration units . And I'll tell you guys a story For a while I've mentioned this before , but for a little bit I was the food and beverage manager for Country Club And when I started there they had had a member that had really liked draft beer and there was no draft beer .

So that member went out and bought a kegerator and I noticed they weren't using it , and so I asked about it and I was told the reason that the kegerator wasn't being used was because it was pouring foamy beer and all the beer was terrible and it just wasn't working right And they needed to get someone out to fix it , but they hadn't had a chance yet .

Blah , blah , blah . And so I looked at it , and most refrigeration units whether we're talking a kegerator or a freezer or a refrigerator in your kitchen , most refrigeration units in bars and restaurants what's going to cause them to run a little hot which this one was is that the condenser , the coils , are covered in dust .

Because when your coils in your refrigeration units get covered in dust , they don't properly put off heat , they retain too much heat and therefore they don't maintain the proper temperature .

So all I did was I went to the office , i grabbed a thing of canned air from our office supply cabinet , came back , sprayed off the coils and , lo and behold , suddenly that keg box that had been pouring terrible , foamy , bad beer for , i think , a couple weeks and no one had done anything about it . Suddenly it worked perfectly .

For about not even 30 minutes I was going to say 30 minutes for about 15 minutes of my time , about five of which was walking to and from the office supply closet , i was able to fix that keg box .

So when it comes to temperature , you need to make sure you're maintaining your refrigeration , blow it out , service it , make sure that your coils are always clean , because that is going to be the number one cause of not having your keg box hold proper graph temperature .

If you're using a long-draw system and you have a walk-in , obviously that's probably not something you're going to service yourself and regardless , you should always have a refrigeration maintenance company that comes out , you know , a couple times a year , every quarter maybe , and services your refrigeration .

They should be doing not only your kitchen refrigeration but your bar refrigeration as well in helping take care of that . But it's very important that you maintain service and that you maintain your refrigeration in order to maintain your draft of your yield .

Now , when it comes to long-draw systems , not only do you potentially have a more complicated refrigeration in that you're using a walk-in and it has much larger condenser and all that could be outside even , but you also have an issue with your draft line . So if you think about a keg box , the draft lines are , you know , four or five feet long .

they run through the keg into the tower and into the tap . It's all refrigerated from that single refrigeration unit of the keg box With a long-draw system . You have the kegs in a walk-in and then you have the lines coming out of that walk-in and running somewhere .

They might be running through walls , they might be running through the ceiling , they might be running through the floor , it could be running literally anywhere . It's just a piece of pex tubing . At that point it's no different than any other plumbit .

But that tubing needs to maintain that 34 to 38 degree temperature , especially because , if you think about it , you will always have beer in those tubes Because you're not emptying that line every time you pour a beer .

And so , in order to do that , you need what's called a glycol system , and a glycol is a refrigerant that you can line these lines in And it moves the glycol continuously through lines next to your beer line . That keeps your beer line cool . Now , obviously , that also means that you have an additional item that you have to make sure stays maintained .

If your glycol system isn't maintained properly , those lines are going to allow the beer to get too warm , and now , all of a sudden , you're back in a position where you're pouring hot beer in a substandard product . So maintaining your glycol system and having a glycol system if you have a long-distance line is always very , very important .

After temperature , the second biggest killer of draft yield is pressure , and you have to think about how kegerators work per second or how just kegs work in general . You have beer that's carbonated in a container . That beer has to be expelled from that container and we do that with CO2 . That CO2 has a certain pressure to it . Now , a few things are true .

If you ever make beer at home and I'm sure some of you have or if you make soda at home , you know that one way that you can carbonate beer where beer is traditionally has a secondary fermentation in a keg or a bottle that naturally produces CO2 through yeast digestion of sugar you can also do what's called force carbonation .

That's where you just hook up a whole bunch of pressurized CO2 to a keg and you force that CO2 into the liquid using pressure , and that's how many home brewers carbonate their beer .

Now , as I mentioned earlier , if you hook too much pressure up to a beer keg that is already pressurized on your draft beer system , you can force carbonate a beer that's already been carbonated And that's going to cause hideous problems Because too high of a pressure , you now have way too much CO2 in your beer , and you will never be able to pour a beer

without foam . Even if it doesn't get to the point that you've actually created more carbonation within the keg and the beer itself too much CO2 , it will move too quickly through your lines and cause excess foam , and again , foam is our enemy when it comes to draft beer .

Now , on the other side of that , if you have the pressure too low , your beer is going to pour really slowly , and that's not good for a few reasons , the main one being that it's going to take your bartenders way too long to pour a draft beer , and so you need this sweet spot .

Now for keg boxes , that sweet spot with pressure is going to be normally around about 12.5 psi . For a long draw system , you're going to have to play with it a little bit , and if you have a really good beer company , install that long draw system . They can probably help you .

You can reach out to your distributors to help you with this as well , but it's all going to depend on the length of your lines . Do they go up , do they go down , do they go left , do they go right , do they have bends ?

Every little thing that's going to affect the ability of beer to flow through that line Will affect the pressure needed to push the beer to the tap properly . But the goal here is always to have enough pressure to push the beer through to the taps without excess pressure that's going to cause excess foam and or overcarbonate our beer .

The third killer of draft yield is unclean lines . This doesn't just kill yield , it kills the taste of your beer as well , and I'm pretty sure everyone at some point in their life has gone to a bar in order to draft beer . You thought , you know , this just tastes a little funny . Something here is not right And it's especially noticeable on lighter beers .

So whether that's , you know , a Miller Lite or a Corona Lite , something that is just a lighter body beer , or even when we may start to get into , you know , craft beers and we start talking about bloggers and lighter ales , anything that you could refer to as a lawnmower beer , all of those are going to pick up bad flavors quickly because there's just not as

much there to cover it up With a stout or a porter . There's just more flavor there , so it's harder to taste than the off flavors . But when you've been out to a bar and you've had that beer and you've thought well , this doesn't just taste quite right , that's probably because the lines weren't clean . And this is a problem for a few reasons .

First of all , it's giving our customers a lower quality product . They never want to do that , so clean lines are essential to maintain product quality . Secondly , clean lines are just a safety issue .

If you have bacteria , if you have mold , if you have things like that in your taps or in your lines , you could get someone sick , and of course , that's obviously not what we ever want to do .

That makes cleanliness of beer lines both a quality issue and a safety issue , and beyond that , as I mentioned earlier , when you don't clean your lines , one thing that happens is beer sits in lines as it forms beer stones , and beer stones are essentially deposits of minerals that form on the inside the line of the beer .

That causes little bumps , and those little bumps at the end of the day serve to agitate the beer as it passes through the line , and this can be especially problematic on long draw lines where you have beer sitting in these long lines for a long period of time .

This agitation of the beer in turn causes the beer to release excess CO2 , which leads to foam when you pour it . So it's very important that you keep clean lines Period Like I really can't emphasize that enough Keep clean draft lines And most places in the United States you can get a distributor that will come in and they will clean their lines .

Now if you use multiple beer distributors , they're probably not going to clean all your lines , just the ones they distribute . And if you're using three or four or five beer distributors , like some folks do in some states , that can be a lot of different people to manage and keep control of cleaning of your draft lines .

I always like to clean draft lines anytime I change a keg , especially always if I'm switching the beer on that line , because the beer on that line the prior beer will taint the flavor of the next beer I put on , unless that's a clean line that that beer is running through .

So you always want to clean your lines between different types of beer , probably between each keg , even if it's just a domestic beer .

Budweiser will always taste better if you clean the lines , and the perfect time to clean the lines is between kegs , the main reason for that being , if you clean a line when a keg is not blown and there's beer in that line , you're going to have to pour out that beer to clean the line itself .

So that's another negative of having distributors clean draft beer lines for you . Every time they clean it they are pouring out good product . If you clean between kegs , you're not pouring out good product . So all this means essentially you have to clean your own draft lines , and while that can sound kind of scary , i promise you it's a very easy thing to do .

You can go online and buy a pretty decent draft beer cleaning system not the kind of distributors you're using , with metal cans and all that , but you can get a plastic draft beer cleaning system that will hook right into your keg system for around 150 bucks And they're really easy to use . You just connect them into your system , run solution through .

You have to take the faucet off , scrub out that faucet with a brush , and here's the thing . If you don't know how to clean a keg A , there are a bunch of videos on YouTube that show the process of cleaning a draft beer system very well .

Also , those distributors , the guys that are coming and cleaning your keg lines most of them will be happy to teach you how to do it yourself because they want you to pour a good product And , frankly , their draft hacks . If they know that you're cleaning your lines and they don't have to come out , that makes them happy . It takes one thing off their list .

So reach out to your distributors , let them help you learn how to do this . Let them help you become very good at cleaning your own lines , because , i will tell you right now , every bar that has perfectly tasting beer every time is cleaning their own lines , not relying on someone else to do it . So get the system , get trained . Clean your own draft beer .

Now , beyond all of this , there's one other reason that you will have a low draft beer , and that is that your employees aren't pouring draft beer , and you see this a lot of times with pitchers or with beers , where people are just pouring foam over the edge , pouring foam down the drain , and obviously that doesn't work .

So I would highly suggest , if you were having yield problems or if you're not , invite one of your beer distributors in to run a training for your team on how to properly pour draft beers . whether that's pints or a taller beer glass or pitchers , you need to know how to properly pour a draft beer .

So invite those folks and they would be happy , generally speaking in most places , to run that training for you and to help your team really understand how to pour a perfect pint . If you're thinking of a beer like Guinness , that's going to be even more intense , because a Guinness perfect pint has a whole procedure to it .

There is a whole ritual to pouring a Guinness . So they will come in happily and teach you how to do it , because , regardless of where you are in the world , there's only one way to pour a Guinness , according to the brewery .

Now we all know that while we can train and train and retrain , sometimes training doesn't quite do it and training leaves a little bit up to chance . So there's also some tech you can use to make sure that you're optimizing your draft beer , and to me there are two really good options here if you want to do them .

One is TurboTap , which you may have seen on Bar Rescue , but that's a longer tap nozzle that fills the beer from the bottom rather than the top , helps to decrease foam produced , makes it easier to get a perfect pour on a beer , still gets a nice head .

So it works in that way and it's just cutting down on the potential for your folks to not pour the beer properly . The other system that you see and there's actually a bar that opened up down the street for me that I've been going to that has one of these and it's pretty cool is a system where the draft beer doesn't even have a nozzle .

It comes out of a disc that is pretty much flush , mounted into the bar And within the glass there is a little coin sized magnetic piece that pops up from the bottom and the beer is literally filled from the bottom . There's no tap , there's none of that . The beer just comes up through the bottom of the glass and that works pretty well .

Now , the problem with that system is it's a little pricey and you are stuck using those glasses . You can't get free glasses to pour beer into from your distributors , like you could with any other system .

That being said , the bottom fill systems are supposed to get you somewhere in the neighborhood of 98 , 99% yield , so it's very possible that the extra cost is made up by the amount of money you spend , although I will tell you personally , with the keg box with normal taps , i was able to routinely yield 93 , 94 , 95 , 96% out of most of the kegs that I pull

in my bar . So you can use new tech . It does make it easier , it does cut down on some of the training , it does kind of provide insurance in that it's harder to mess it up .

But also good training , good processes , good procedures , clean lines that are the right temperature and the right pressure can get you into the mid 90s easily on yield with just a standard keg box or a standard long draw system . So to sum it all up here , a successful draft beer operation is key to making money in your bar .

Draft beer is one of the easiest places to not get the yield you need and to lose money , or rather , i shouldn't say lose money but to not make the profit that you should .

So if you have draft beer , it is essential to make sure that you have clean lines at the right temperature , the right pressure , your staff is trained well and you're doing everything you can to optimize your yield and in turn optimize your profits . Switching gears here real quick .

As we wrap up , if you have not had a chance to listen to it , there was a special episode that came out two Fridays ago . That was the a couple chapters , i should say , of the audio book for how to make top shelf profits in the bar business .

So that's a great way to get a feel for the book itself , which , if you had not had a chance to check it out , there's a link to purchase the book or just see the book on Amazon in the show notes .

So if you have Kindle , unlimited is available there so you can read it as part of your subscription and that should be out on audio book on Audible within the next couple of weeks . I'm in the process of waiting for Audible to approve everything and that takes a little bit of time , so I will make sure you guys know when that happens .

But check out the book . If you had a chance , definitely go check out that podcast episode , because it's just a really good way to familiarize yourself a little bit with the books like , with the audio books like , and see if it's something you may want to buy . Additionally , if you have not yet , head over to Facebook , look up Bar Business Nation .

There's also a link for that in the show notes And that is where we are trying to build a community of bar owners to help each other and really a place to ask questions , a place to learn , a place to put ideas towards each other , to just kind of brainstorm .

Whatever that may be , but the idea behind this is to build a strong community of bar owners that supports each other . That helps each other , because we are always stronger together than we are individually and none of us know everything . No one has every great idea in their head . So join Bar Business Nation .

Check out the podcast episode with the book in it If you have not yet . On that note , i will let you guys go . Hope you have a great rest of your week and we will talk again later .