The Industry Plague: Overpoured Spirits

(1st in the "It's Not Magic, It's Math" series)

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Day One Practice Number One

Over 14 years ago, I began conducting best practices workshops for alcohol business owners and managers. To identify best practices for the workshop, I interviewed my peers, ABC officials and other law enforcement officers, hospitality lawyers, insurance professionals, and alcohol harm prevention specialists. But, from day one in putting together the curriculum I knew sharing information about profitable pouring would be critical.

After 20 years of owning and operating restaurants and nightclubs, I’ve learned that mastering profitable pouring both:

Drastically improves profitability and sales, and
Reduces issues from overconsumption, which are the root of most serious problems in alcohol businesses operating past 10 PM.

Overconsumption leads to costly insurance claims and frequent first responder calls.

I wish I could say that reducing overconsumption also protects a business’s ABC license, but I can’t since the law against overserving alcohol is rarely enforced in California. Truth. More about that in another blog.

The Case for Profitable Pouring

I was thrilled to find a study confirming what I had suspected: my initial mismanagement of spirit pouring, resulting in a $14,000,000 mistake, was an industry-wide issue.

Here’s the study’s takeaway:

One-spirit cocktails are overpoured by an average of 42%.
This means 29% of purchased distilled spirits are effectively given away for free.

Calculation

y = Desired pour level (1.50)

x= Actual pour (2.13)

% Overpour = (x-y)/y (.42)

% Poured that was waste = (x-y)/x (.29)

Given the constraint that % overpoured = 0.29

Following client demand, I launched a secret shopper service to evaluate bartender pouring. Results confirmed the 42% overpour average for single-spirit drinks. However, the real shock came with multi-spirit cocktails: