The purser needs a bar inventory value for the monthly accounts by Friday, the owner has asked why the bar spend was EUR 14,000 last month, and a bottle of the owner's Japanese whisky is half-empty and nobody knows why. All three problems have the same solution: a stock system that is actually kept.
Counting Stock
- Count on a fixed cycle — end of each month, and always before and after a charter.
- Count full bottles by unit and open bottles by tenths (eyeball to the nearest 10%) or, better, by weighing: (gross weight − empty bottle weight) gives the liquid remaining, and it is far more accurate than the eye.
- Count everything: bar, bond locker, cellar, deck fridges, the crew mess. Uncounted stock is where variance hides.
- Two people count, one records. Solo counts drift.
The Numbers That Matter
| Metric | Formula | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Cost per ml | Bottle cost / bottle ml | The basis of every other number |
| Drink cost | Sum of (ml x cost per ml) + garnish | What a single drink consumes |
| Inventory value | Sum of (units x unit cost) | The figure the purser needs |
| Usage | Opening + purchases − closing | What was actually consumed |
| Variance | Usage − recorded pours | Waste, over-pouring, breakage or loss |
| Pour cost % | Drink cost / sale price x 100 | Only meaningful on commercial sales |
On a private yacht there is no sale price, so pour cost percentage is largely academic. The meaningful figures are inventory value, usage per guest per day and variance. Owners and management companies care about a bar that is predictable and accountable — not one that is cheap.
Worked example: a 700 ml bottle of gin at EUR 30 is EUR 0.043/ml. A 60 ml pour costs EUR 2.57. If your log shows 40 gin drinks (2,400 ml) but the bottles show 3,000 ml gone, you have a 600 ml variance — roughly EUR 26, and more importantly a sign of free-pouring, an unlogged crew drink, or a spill nobody recorded.
Controlling Variance
- Jigger, do not free-pour. Free-pouring routinely runs 10-20% over spec and destroys both balance and cost control.
- Log everything: drinks served, breakages, spills, tastings, crew consumption, and anything used for prep or testing. A logged loss is data; an unlogged one is a missing bottle.
- Control access. The bond locker and any high-value spirits are locked, with a named keyholder.
- Track waste: unsold batches, spoiled citrus, oxidised vermouth. Waste is usually a bigger number than theft, and it is entirely fixable with better forecasting and smaller batches.
- Reconcile against the provisioning invoices, not from memory.
Onboard Notes
- Never take a bottle "to replace later". It is the single most common way a good crew member ends up dismissed for theft.
- Discrepancies in the owner's rare stock must be reported immediately to the chief stew or purser. Discovering it yourself and reporting it is professional; having it discovered for you is not.
- Keep the stock system somewhere the whole department can access. Spreadsheets that live on one crew member's laptop leave the yacht when they do.