Garnish Costs
A $0.30 peel on every drink is a five-figure hidden cost over a year. Cost every drop.
Updated October 2, 2026
Bartenders routinely leave garnish out of the recipe because "it's just a peel." Do the math. The number is bigger than it looks.
A worked example
A $0.30 garnish per cocktail, in a bar doing 50 cocktails a night, six nights a week:
- 50 cocktails per night times $0.30 equals $15 per night.
- $15 times 6 nights times 52 weeks equals roughly $4,700 a year.
- Add citrus, herbs, bitters drops, salt rims, and it's easily $10,000 to $20,000 a year unaccounted.
Adding garnish to a recipe
Add each garnish to your Bar Inventory as its own ingredient (the Garnish type lets you cost by the piece). A lemon costs you, say, $0.50 and yields six peels, so each peel is about $0.08. Bitters work the same way: a dash in PourCost is 0.5ml, so a 4oz bottle of Angostura holds about 236 dashes. At $12 a bottle, that is about a nickel a dash. Add them to the cocktail at their real amounts and the meter reflects the real drink.
Honest math