I don’t know exact figures, but I’ve heard typical profits for the pub of perhaps 10-20p per pint. There’s several issues - people certainly expect them to be an inexpensive option, they’re served in 20oz pints (full pints, mind you!), and from cask ale in particular there’s significant wastage. Non-beer bottled drinks (alcopops etc.) give much bigger profits, as does food where they’re able to provide it.
Being a beer drinking nation, we tend to put a lot of effort into working these things out:
Office of Fair Trading report on the Impact of Brewery Managed Pubs vs Free Houses
Both cover the cost of a pint at sale vs the cost to the pub during the course of their investigations, but its difficult to pin down a proper cost as neither report is prepared to make any clear estimates when it comes to factoring in anything other than the wholesale price of the beer from the brewery.
Both reports should be taken with a pinch of salt though - they draw heavily on 1999 figures for their estimates, which to my mind fails to take into account the massive Alcopop and bottled lager boom over the last 5 years.
What is pretty clear though is that your margins on draught lager are far lower than those on bottled beer, soft drinks, spirits and food.
Draught Lager may form the bulk of your sales, but its the other stuff you need to shift if you’re going to break even.
As a Landlord mate of mine once said:
“The blokes pay your rent, the ladies pay for everything else.”
My gut is that your actual “profit” (after brewery, wasteage, tax and venue) on a pint is probably in the range Gorillaman suggested (about 20-30p a pint) and that that is probably pretty much the same anywhere in the country - pints are more expensive in London, but then so is the rent!
Pretty much every American bar i’ve been into so far would fail against the short measure criteria in the second report by the way 
I dont know, you can take it pretty much for certain that pubs get their draft beer for far less than you’d pay for a can of lager in a supermarket. Since they usually charge the customer 2.5 times that, they must make quite a bit.
Of coarse, they’d like you to think that they dont make so much.
Finding wholesale prices isn’t easy, so all I can come up with is an admittedly-biased Camra article, which has even the lowest price of a barrel of cask beer at £130 - after wastage, that’s about 70p/pint. According to garius’ links, the average cost of a pint in 2000, minus duty, was about £1.30. So that’s 60p profit, for the biggest pub chains where they can negotiate huge discounts. With a small chain or independent pub buying a barrel at the full price of £250, the profit’s down to 10-20p, which was what I vaguely suggested earlier.
(Oh, and that also explains why Wetherspoons can sell beer at the prices it does.)
What GorillaMan said.
Wholesale-wise your average free-house is probably paying about the same as you’re paying in the off-licence for its Kronenbourg and suchlike (assuming your getting the same 6 for a fiver deal i used to and taking into account the difference in volume) maybe a bit less. Chuck on top the various costs and whatnot and you’re probably looking at a “break-even” price for a pint that is somewhere between GorillaMan’s Camra price (which is too high) and OFT’s £1.85 (which needs to be adjusted for inflation and the fact that most of the OFT researchers i know drink in Sam Smith’s pubs ). My guess is at somewhere around £2.40* and maybe £2.10 for your managed bar.
That’d give you an average profit in line with GorillaMan’s estimates.
Contrary to popular myth, we aren’t getting shafted by Pubs on beer prices - we’re getting shafted by brewers.
You can find pretty good evidence of that just by looking at the profit breakdowns in those reports - statistically a pub makes about the same amount of revenue off of draught beer as it does off of non-beer drink sales.
Think how much draught beer a pub sells in proportion to other stuff, and you can get a good idea that there is no real money being generated by draught.
*i’m at home so i have an English keyboard now. Rule Britannia!
Yay! You can accurately type “”@"@@@"@""@"@" to your heart’s content!
Think of it as an investment in future service. Example 1:
At Mardi Gras you can drink in the street but have to go into a bar or to a stall to get a drink. The lines are huge and can take 20 minutes or more to get served. I got up to the front and ordered a handgrenade. I said, " go easy on the ice and the tip will be huge."
“Yeah?” he asked.
“Obscene,” I replied. I got the stadium sized cups for my mates and I with about two cubes in each (as opposed to their normal practice of filling it with ice first).
I seriously overtipped and he handed me receipt saying, “Just wave this in the air and we’ll take you first.” That would have been cool except that the one drink had me completely sloshed so I didn’t need it.
Example 2:
At a bar in St Louis that was offering 50 cent rum and cokes. My friends owed me and were therefore buying me drinks. Halfway through the night they stopped being served. The bartender just flat out pretended they didn’t exist. Why? Because they were tipping 15%… off of the 50 cent drinks.
Investment.
My sister worked in a rather posh bar in Newcastle-upon-Tyne which was frequented by footballers on a regular basis.
If she was offered a drink, she was told to take 10% for herself and put the rest in the jar. The jar was then divvied up at the end of the week. Since Footballers often gave her the guts of £50 as a tip (however one guy used to order a bottle of Kristal, pay with £500 and tell her to keep the change) it usually worked out better for the other employees than it did for her (my sister being the one who got the looks in the family, and hence the tips in the bar).
Their staff drink usually consisted of a bottle of whatever spirit the manager fancied, shared out between the 7 of them after closing…I don’t quite know how common that one is though.
Sorry that should have read “£1500 for a bottle of Cristal”, which left her a tip of about £100 at the time.
Just shows how shallow footballers are really.
Well, if you have money to burn, my friend…
Me, I’ll wait in line with the other peasants. It’s very seldom that I would be in the position where I needed to go back to a huge queue to get another drink. What you’re doing is just encouraging the barmen/women to treat customers differently depending on how much money they have. Also, you’re giving them tax free income when is a bit dodgy imo.
Tips are not tax free income. Waitstaff have to report their tips. Granted, not all of them might be completely honest, but they still have to report something.
Both the “$” and the “D” mean “dollar,” so you’ve got a redundancy here. “$1” means “one dollar.” “One U.S. dollar” can be written “$1 (US)” or “US$1.” I’ve also seen “USD 1.” But if it’s clear you’re talking about the United States, just “$1” will do usually.
As opposed to the UK, where minimum wage doesn’t include tips, which ARE tax-free (well, not technically, but usually, yes). Different culture.
True, but because he addressed that remark to someone who was talking about tipping in the US, I figured I’d point out the error.
I always here that wait persons appreciate tips in cash just so they can evade the taxes! And the same ones often have the nerve to complain about 15% tips for “just okay” service?!?
As a hijacking aside of a mostly exhausted thread, several local restaurants DEDUCT CREDIT CARD FEES from the tips of their servers if you put the tip on your credit card. It was something like 3% at a local restaurant, which probably works out to the restaurant’s cost on the fees.
Another reason besides felony tax evasion to tip the waitstaff in cash.
Eh, dont see your point here.
My point is, pay your server cash if you can and you just increase what they get from your tip by 3%.