Cut draught beer wastage now

Last updated: 26 June 2026

Most pub licensees will never know they’re losing thousands of pounds a year to draught beer wastage—because they’re not measuring it. A 1% stock loss on wet sales quietly costs a typical pub £3,000–£5,000 annually, and draught lines are where most of that loss hides. Temperature swings, poor line cleaning, kinked tubes, and measurement error mean you’re pouring away profit every single day without realising it. The good news is that once you start tracking it properly, you can claw back that money within weeks.

You probably know something’s wrong with your stock—the till says one thing, your count says another, and somewhere in the middle is money you can’t account for. This article will show you exactly where draught wastage happens, how to measure it reliably, and the weekly cellar routine that actually works.

What Causes Draught Beer Wastage

Draught beer wastage happens in three main ways: temperature creep, line cleaning waste, and poor cellar housekeeping. Most pub licensees think wastage is spillage you can see. It isn’t. The real damage is invisible.

Temperature Swings in the Cellar

If your cellar isn’t sitting at a steady 12–13°C, the beer inside your kegs is expanding and contracting. In summer, when the cellar creeps above 15°C, CO₂ comes out of solution and escapes as foam or pressure. In winter, the opposite happens. Either way, you lose volume and consistency. A keg that sits in a warm cellar for three days can lose 2–3 litres without you ever knowing.

The fix is simple: fit a cheap thermometer and check it every morning. Most pubs don’t. It costs nothing and saves hundreds a year.

Line Cleaning Waste

When you clean your draught lines—and you should be doing this weekly—you’re flushing cleaning solution and stale beer through the pipes. That liquid has to go somewhere. Some pubs measure it, most don’t. A full-length line clean on a four-tap system can waste 8–12 litres of good product if you’re not careful about residual liquid or over-flushing. Do that twice a week, and you’re throwing away 50–100 litres a month without recording it as wastage.

Kinked Tubes and Pressure Leaks

A kinked beer line behind the bar or in the cellar forces the pump to work harder and creates microscopic leaks. Over a week, those drips add up. A bent check valve or cracked connector can weep gas for days before you notice. Most publicans check the obvious—kegs on the floor, puddles behind the bar—but never look at the tube runs themselves.

Walk your cellar once a week and run your hand along every inch of tube. You’ll spot bent fittings and rough patches where the sheathing is wearing.

The True Cost of Not Measuring It

Here’s the number that matters: a 1% loss on wet sales costs you real money. For a pub turning over £150,000 a year on draught, 1% is £1,500 in lost revenue. But the actual hit to your pocket is worse, because you’re losing the gross profit on that beer too.

A 1% stock loss on wet sales quietly costs a typical pub £3,000–£5,000 a year. That’s not a guess—it’s what happens when you’re not measuring draught stock properly.

Most of the time, that loss isn’t theft. It’s measurement error, forgotten wastage, line cleaning waste, and temperature loss all stacked on top of each other. You record 50 litres sold but only 48 actually left the tap. Over a month, that gap becomes invisible. Over a year, it’s a holiday you didn’t take.

The worst part? You can’t fix what you don’t measure. If you’re not running a weekly line check, you have no idea whether the problem got worse last month or better. You’re flying blind.

How to Measure Draught Stock Accurately

Measuring draught stock is not complicated. It requires three things: a StockTap pub stock app to log the numbers, a dipstick to measure cask depth, and discipline to do it every week.

The Three Tools You Need

First: a dipstick. This is a metal ruler marked in litres. You drop it into the keg bung hole, it tells you how many litres are left. Cost: £8–12. Every cask should have one or two in the cellar. No excuse not to own them.

Second: a set of digital scales. Weigh every open spirit bottle—gin, vodka, rum, whisky—the same day you count. A spirit bottle that’s supposed to weigh 750ml but weighs 710ml tells you 40ml has walked out that week. If it’s happening across four bottles, that’s 160ml a week, or 8+ litres a year, on spirits alone. Scales cost £20–30.

Third: a till reconciliation process. Your EPOS recorded X pints sold on Tuesday. Your stock count says Y pints left the keg. The difference should be noise—a pint or two. If it’s consistently off by 10%, you’ve found your leak.

The number that actually matters is wet GP by line, not a single headline stock figure. Spirits hide losses in over-pouring (a free-poured 25ml is often 32–35ml), draught hides it in poor cellar temperature and bad line cleaning waste, and most stock ‘theft’ is actually measurement error and forgotten wastage. Weigh open spirit bottles, dip every cask and partial keg, and reconcile against till data the same day.

Recording It

You can use a spreadsheet or an app. The spreadsheet works, but you’ll lose the data, forget rows, and end up with conflicting versions stored on three different devices. A simple SmartPubTools approach is to log your weekly count in the same place every time, with the date and the till figure next to it. Then you can spot trends.

At my own pub I was running stock on a tangle of spreadsheets and still losing track of partial kegs and spirit measures. I built a simple count routine around a dipstick and a set of scales, and the weekly variance went from guesswork to a number I could trust within a fortnight. That confidence—knowing your stock position for certain, not hoping—is worth more than the equipment alone.

The Weekly Cellar Routine That Works

The most effective way to stop draught wastage is to run a dedicated cellar count every single week at the same time, on the same day, and record it in the same place. Monday morning, before service. 20 minutes. Non-negotiable.

The 20-Minute Count

Walk the cellar with a notepad or a mobile device. For every cask and partial keg on the floor:

• Record the product name and brand
• Dip it and write down the litres remaining
• Note the date it was opened (if you don’t already have a marker on the keg)
• Check the temperature on your cellar thermometer
• Look for obvious leaks, kinked tubes, or pressure problems

Upstairs, weigh every open spirit bottle and record the weight. Then open your EPOS and pull the sales figures for the past seven days by product. Compare the numbers. If the till says 45 litres of lager sold and your stock drop is only 42 litres, you’re missing 3 litres somewhere. Is it line cleaning waste you forgot to record? A kinked tube? A temperature spike?

Most pubs that move from a messy spreadsheet to a disciplined count routine claw back 1–2 GP points within a couple of months. Not because they suddenly found a thief. Because they started seeing the real numbers and could fix the small leaks before they became big problems.

What to Do When Numbers Don’t Match

When your till doesn’t match your stock count by more than 5%, investigate the same day. Don’t wait for the monthly stocktake. Don’t assume it’s normal variance. It might be:

• Line cleaning waste you didn’t measure or record
• A pump that’s pouring heavier than it should (test with a jug and stopwatch)
• A loose fitting somewhere bleeding CO₂ or beer overnight
• A till ring-in error or a night shift that didn’t log a keg change

Once you spot the pattern, you can fix it. If it’s a pump issue, you can adjust the regulator. If it’s a fitting, you can replace it. If it’s a process issue, you can retrain staff. None of this happens if you’re only counting stock once a month.

Common Wastage Mistakes You’re Probably Making

Not Recording Line Cleaning Waste

You pull 10 litres of beer through the lines every Friday to flush out the cleaning solution. That 10 litres is product waste. If you’re not noting it somewhere, your stock count will be 10 litres short and you’ll think you’ve got a leak. You probably don’t. You just forgot to record your cleaning waste. Start a simple “wastage log” and write down every line clean, every pint poured for training, every sample given away. It takes 30 seconds and stops you chasing ghosts.

Assuming the Brewery Stocktaker Will Catch Problems

The brewery rep visits once a month. By then, you’ve already lost weeks’ worth of data and you can’t see whether the problem is getting worse or better. By the time the brewery stocktaker notices a variance, the damage is done. You need your own weekly check, not as a backup to the brewery, but as your primary control. The brewery count is just a verification.

Not Checking Cellar Temperature

I’ve seen pubs with a temperamental cellar cooler that drifts between 12°C and 17°C depending on the weather and how much the fridge is working. Nobody’s watching it. The stock losses across a season can be 15–20 litres from temperature alone. A thermometer costs less than a round of drinks and takes five seconds to read every morning.

Using an EPOS Report That Doesn’t Break Down by Line

If your till is giving you a lager report instead of a “Carlsberg draught” report, you can’t reconcile properly. You need to know exactly what left the tap, by product, every single day. If your EPOS doesn’t offer that, ask your provider to set it up. It’s usually a five-minute configuration.