We are expanding our current shop & adding to our menu. We are trying to add Draft beer to our menu and need some advice. Do any of you that serve beer have tips for theft prevention? We have looked into draft beer meters. Have any of you used a beer meter? Any tips would be appreciated.
How many employees? how many under drinking age? While I think you can institute some measures to limit siphoning, there may be some shrinkage regardless. Depending on the size of the shop, and the management style, beer meters and other measures broadcast to your employees that you do not trust them. Once that culture gets started, it is very hard to get out of. If you have a pos system it should be very easy to figure out how many beers got sold off of each keg or pony. If you track the sales per beer/pitcher at every keg switch then you should know roughly how many got sold. If your way below the object number, either employees are stealing or cant pour beer correctly, which wastes product.
You can do some basic math to figure out how many pitchers are in a keg (around 95) if I remember from by bar owner days. If you keep track of it in your POS, you should be able to have a good idea, but you’ll never be positive because there is always waste in pouring beer.
I’ve read of people using bathroom scales to monitor beer usage at the end of the business day. Might be worth looking into.
We use our POS and track each beer variety sold on a spreadsheet to make sure we’re getting very close to the expected servings per keg. It’s not 100% b/c as others have said, everyone pours different plus especially with this added heat and humidity foaming increases and simply must be “wasted” to get to clear beer.
What do you guys use as the acceptable percentage for waste?
I would say up to 10% could realistically happen for keg beer. I remember each brand being different (Miller Lite was always really foamy) and the weather, mostly humidity, seemed to affect it.
To add to the previous post, if your lines are pouring too much froth/foam, have your beer rep, or whoever cleans your lines tweak/reset the gas setting for optimal performance. Also, this is something I had to do when working at a different shop, give a beer pouring workshop/training. The volume of wasted beer dramatically increases when the employees do not know how to pour a pitcher.
Two things.
First, ANY anti theft measurment will ONLY keep those BASICALLy honest person…honest. Those who have theft in their nature will ALWAYS get over.
Second. I would figure a number of stolen mugs…say 4 a day into your price scheme, so , at least, you will recover the COST of the beer.
If possible keep the keg NEAR busy place, where anyone pulling a draft can be seen. Sooner or later, they will get careless, but they will eventually get caught…usually the least sneaky.
Beer is a great markup, but it brings with it problems.
Make sure your temperature is correct…Too warm and it will result in waste because of too much foam…