Cask vs keg: which makes more money?

Last updated: 29 June 2026

Most pub licensees assume cask and keg are just different formats of the same product, with one marginally better for profit than the other. They’re wrong. The real difference sits in three places: the margin you’re given by the brewery, the waste you create, and the stock loss that happens between delivery and the till. Get one of those wrong, and your choice costs you hundreds a month.

You’ve probably felt the pressure: your pubco pushes keg because it’s easier to track and shifts faster. Your customers ask for cask because it’s what they remember drinking. And your accountant never asks about it at all, because stock variance gets buried in a single “variance” line on your P&L instead of being broken down by format.

The profit difference between cask and keg can swing your wet GP by 3–5 points. That’s not small. For a typical £500k turnover pub, that’s £15,000–£25,000 a year in the line you have the most control over.

This article breaks down the real numbers: the wholesale margin, the wastage you can’t see, the shelf-life trap, and which format actually makes you more money. I’ll also show you the measurement mistake that most pubs make when comparing the two.

Read this if you’re choosing between cask and keg for a section of your bar, or if you’re trying to work out why your draught margin isn’t matching what your pubco told you it would be.

Cask vs Keg: The Raw Margin

Cask beer typically carries a 2–4 percentage point higher gross profit margin than keg, all else being equal. This is the starting point most pubs see on their price list, and it’s why many licensees still push cask.

The reason is simple: cask is lower cost for the brewery to produce and distribute. There’s no carbonation rig, no pressure seal kit, no deposit on the container. The cask itself is returnable, but it’s cheaper to manage than the keg infrastructure. That saving gets passed on to you as a lower wholesale cost, which translates to a bigger margin for the same selling price.

Let me give you real numbers from my own pub. A cask ale at £4.20 retail might cost us £2.10 wholesale (50% GP). The same brewery’s keg version at £4.20 might cost £2.30 (45% GP). That’s a 5-point spread. Across 40 pints a day of cask, that’s roughly £40 extra gross profit per week on that single product.

Sounds like cask wins, right? Not if you’re wasting 8% of it.

Waste and Spoilage: Where the Money Goes

The most effective way to measure draught profit is not by format, but by comparing what you purchased against what actually reached a customer’s glass and generated revenue.

This is where cask and keg diverge dramatically.

Cask has a shorter shelf life once opened. Most real ale doesn’t hold quality beyond 7–10 days. If you’re not turning a cask quickly in quieter sessions or slower seasons, you’ll dump it. That’s waste. That’s real money lost.

I ran a quiet Tuesday-Thursday session for years. We’d open a cask Monday night, pull maybe 15 pints by close of business Wednesday, and by Thursday lunchtime the customer could taste it was past its best. We’d try to shift it with discounts — which cuts the margin further — or dump it. Either way, the margin gap that looked so attractive on the price list vanished.

Keg holds for weeks. Carbonation is sealed, temperature is stable. You pull from the same keg across multiple days without quality degradation. That means less waste, fewer partial kegs left sitting in the cellar for “just one more day,” and fewer end-of-week writes.

Here’s the real kicker: StockTap pub stock app and proper weekly line checks show that most pubs don’t actually track cask waste reliably. They assume it’s minimal, or they note it but never reconcile it against the margin math. When I started logging every half-cask and quarter-cask dump against revenue, I discovered we were losing 6–8% of our cask purchases to waste. That erased the margin advantage entirely.

Keg waste, by contrast, is almost zero. A keg either works or it doesn’t. You’re either pulling clean pints or you’re calling the brewery to swap it out. There’s no grey area where you’re “using it up” at a discount or throwing good beer down the drain.

Shelf Life and Stock Turnover

Shelf life drives cash flow and working capital. This matters more than most licensees realise.

A 9-gallon cask needs to be sold within 7–10 days or it becomes a liability. If you buy 4 casks a week in summer but only 2 casks a week in January, you’re either carrying old stock or making emergency calls to suppliers to reduce orders. Stock sits on your balance sheet. It ties up cash.

Keg shifts that problem. A keg sits indefinitely if it needs to. No rush to sell it off, no discount pricing to move old stock. You buy what fits your demand curve, and the stock doesn’t decay. Better working capital, fewer emergency discounts, cleaner margin.

In a mixed estate — say, 4 real ales on cask and 3 popular brands on keg — I’ve found that the keg lines actually turn faster in quiet periods, not slower. Why? Because customers know they’re fresh. There’s no risk. A cask line that’s been open for 6 days has a stigma. A keg line has none.

The Hidden Loss: Poor Measurement

Now we get to the number that actually matters to your bottom line: measurement error and forgotten wastage account for more profit loss than format choice ever will.

Most stock loss isn’t theft. It’s not format. It’s bad measurement. Spirits hide losses in over-pouring. Draught hides it in poor cellar temperature, bad line cleaning waste, and cask sediment that gets thrown out without being logged. A pint of cask that starts cloudy gets discarded without a stock write. A keg that’s two-thirds empty gets moved to cold storage and forgotten. A partial bottle of spirit gets used in a staff drink without being recorded.

A 1% stock loss on wet sales quietly costs a typical pub £3,000–£5,000 a year. That’s not format-specific. That’s process-specific.

I was running stock on a tangle of spreadsheets for years. I still couldn’t account for partial kegs and spirit measures reliably. The weekly variance was guesswork. When I built a simple count routine — dip every cask and partial keg, weigh open spirit bottles, reconcile against till data the same day — the variance went from mystery to a number I could trust within a fortnight.

Once you have that discipline in place, format choice becomes much clearer. You can see exactly how much cask is wasting in sediment, how much keg is holding, and which line is actually generating the GP you expected.

Most pubs that move from messy spreadsheets to a disciplined weekly count claw back 1–2 GP points within a couple of months. That’s more than the margin difference between cask and keg. You fix measurement first, then optimise format.

Which Format Actually Delivers Higher Profit?

So which one wins?

If your customer demand is consistent, your cellar is cold and clean, and you can turn a cask in 5 days or less, cask wins on profit. The margin advantage holds, waste is minimal, and you’re not tying up extra working capital on stock that sits.

If your demand is lumpy — quiet midweek, busy weekends — or if your cellar temperature fluctuates, or if you’re running real ale lines that compete for attention with 15 other brands, keg wins. You avoid the waste, you reduce the working capital drag, and your margin, while lower per pint, is more reliable and more certain.

The real answer: it depends on your specific pub, and most licensees choose based on what the pubco wants to push rather than what their numbers show.

My pub runs 60% cask, 40% keg. The cask lines are on steady ales — ales that turn consistently, that have a loyal customer base, that sit at a perfect temperature in the cellar. The keg lines are seasonals, experiments, and brands that need to build momentum. That mix gives me cask margins most of the time and keg stability when I need it. It also means I’m not comparing “cask vs keg” as a binary. I’m optimising both.

Building a Mixed Strategy That Works

The licensees making the most money from draught aren’t choosing cask or keg. They’re choosing both, and they’re choosing based on data.

Start here: log your weekly line waste by format for 8 weeks. Don’t estimate. Dip, weigh, count. Note every partial, every dump, every write-off. Compare the total cost of goods sold against the revenue those lines generated.

Your profit per format will emerge. It’s usually not what you expected.

Then ask yourself three questions:

• Does my customer demand support this format? (Is the cask turning fast enough? Is the keg building a following?)
• Does my cellar condition support it? (Can I maintain the temperature and cleanliness this format needs?)
• Am I measuring it accurately? (Or am I guessing at waste and calling it variance?)

If you’re serious about profit, the third question matters most. SmartPubTools was built to answer it. A proper weekly stocktake — cask dips, keg weights, spirit bottle weights, till reconciliation — takes 20 minutes. It removes the guesswork. Once you know your actual numbers, cask vs keg stops being a philosophical question. It becomes a math problem.

Most pubs never get there. They run on assumptions, trust their memory, and wonder why their margin isn’t hitting target. If you want yours to be different, start with measurement.