How a $14 Cocktail Becomes a $40 Margin
An accounting walkthrough nobody put me through when I started, and one I have now had with eight bar owners.
By the editor · April 3, 2026
A bar owner I have known for nine years told me last month that her cocktail program had finally turned profitable. Nine years. She has been running a 90-seat room in a major coastal city, a room that tourists know, a room that locals know, a room I have personally drunk in upwards of forty times.
Nine years. To get a cocktail program to profitability.
I asked her what changed. The answer was a single line item, and the line item is what I want to walk through here, because it is the line item nobody put me through when I was starting, and it is the line item I have now had a long version of this conversation with eight separate bar owners about.
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The line item is ice. Not the pour, not the spirit, not the labor. Ice. Specifically: the cost of carrying a clear-block program when your room is selling 220 cocktails a night and your machine is producing for 140. What looks like a cost of goods problem on the spreadsheet is actually a capacity problem disguised as a quality problem…