If your kitchen takes beer for the batter or wine for the gravy straight off the bar and nobody writes it down, your stocktake reports it as a bar loss, valued at what you'd have sold it for, and your kitchen GP looks better than it really is. On the example below, about £24 a week of drink at cost shows up as nearly £90 a week of "missing" bar stock, over £4,500 a year. The fix is a transfer sheet and one line on the stock report.
I've never seen this in a stocktaking guide, and it's one of the commonest innocent causes of a bar deficit there is. Nobody's stealing anything. The chef is cooking. But the bar count can't tell the difference between a pint in a batter bowl and a pint in somebody's mouth, so it calls both a loss.
What leaves the bar for the kitchen
Walk your own kitchen and write down every drink that goes into food. Most pubs I know would find some of these:
- Beer or lager for batter, often pulled off the font because it's quicker than finding a bottle
- Red wine for gravy, the Sunday beef and the steak pie
- Stout or ale for pies and stews
- Cider with pork
- Sherry, port and brandy through December for trifles, sauces and the Christmas pudding
- Soft drinks and mixers for staff meals, kids' meal deals or cooking
None of it is wrong. A good beer batter needs beer. The problem is purely in the paperwork.
The sum: how a normal week turns into a "deficit"
Here's an illustrative week. The batter quantity comes from a published recipe, the prices from the figures I've used in other guides.
- Batter. Published recipes vary: one uses 150ml of beer to batter four fillets, another 230ml. Take the bigger one, about 58ml a portion. A pub doing 60 fish and chips a week uses 3,450ml, which is just over 6 pints off the bar.
- Wine. Two bottles of house red a week into gravy and sauces. At £5.99 a bottle wholesale, that's £11.98 of wine at cost.
Now look at how each side of the business sees it.
| Item | Cost to the pub (ex VAT) | What the bar count says is missing (at selling price) |
|---|---|---|
| 6.1 pints of lager for batter | £12.15 (at £2.00 a pint) | £32.43 (at £5.34 a pint) |
| 2 bottles of house red for gravy | £11.98 (at £5.99 a bottle) | £55.71 (8.6 large glasses at £6.50) |
| Per week | £24.13 | £88.15 |
| Per year | £1,255 | £4,584 |
A lot of stocktake reports express a shortage at selling price, because that's the money the till should have had. So on a pub taking £5,000 a week across the bar, that £88 is a 1.8% deficit every single week, sitting right in the range where a stocktaker starts frowning and an area manager starts asking who's on the late shift. I've written about what an acceptable variance looks like, and nearly 2% of pure paperwork eats most of it.
Meanwhile the kitchen got £24.13 of ingredients for free. On £2,500 a week of food sales before VAT, that flatters the kitchen GP by about a point.
Why the kitchen side matters more than it looks
The bar side gets the attention because it's the one that looks like theft. The kitchen side is the one that costs money in a less obvious way.
First, your menu prices are wrong. If the beer-battered fish is costed without the beer and the beef without the wine, the dish costs more than your spec sheet says. On a dish you sell sixty times a week, a 30p miss is £18 a week.
Second, if you pay a kitchen GP bonus, a point of GP the kitchen didn't earn can be the difference between hitting the target and missing it. Paying a bonus on drink the bar paid for isn't fair to anyone, including the chef, whose real performance you can't see.
Third, December. Mulled wine for the winter menu, brandy for the puddings and port for the cheese board can turn a two-bottle week into a ten-bottle week right when the Christmas stocktake is under the most pressure.
The fix: a transfer sheet
It's not complicated and it doesn't need software. It needs the kitchen to write things down at the moment they take them.
- One sheet, on the wall where the kitchen gets its drink. Columns: date, item, quantity, who took it, what for.
- Quantities in bar units. Pints, bottles, measures. Not "a splash".
- Value it at cost, ex VAT. A transfer isn't a sale. It moves the cost of the drink from the bar's numbers to the kitchen's.
- Give the total to whoever does the stocktake. It goes on the report as an allowance or a transfer to food, the same way you'd record a breakage in the wastage log, and it comes off the bar deficit.
- Add the same total to the kitchen's purchases in its food stocktake, so the kitchen GP is honest.
If your till can do it, some pubs ring transfers through on a zero-price button so they show up in the product sales and the count matches. Whatever you use, the rule is the same: if it left the bar and wasn't sold, it gets written down that day.
The cleaner fix: buy the kitchen's drink on the kitchen's account
Here's the better idea. Stop the kitchen taking from the bar at all. Put a case of cooking lager and a box of cheap red on the food order, on the food supplier's invoice, stored in the kitchen. Now it's a food cost from the moment it arrives. It never touches the bar count, it never needs a transfer sheet, and the chef can see exactly what the batter costs.
It also stops the slow creep. A kitchen that pulls a pint off the Guinness font for the pie, and a pint of Guinness costs the pub about £2.20 before anything else, has no reason to stop at one. A kitchen with its own four cans of stout on the shelf does.
Before you blame anyone
If your bar has been showing a steady deficit of a similar size every week, and it's worst on the lines and wines the kitchen uses, ask the chef before you ask the bar staff. A loss that's the same size every week and lands on the same products is usually a process, not a person. The others worth ruling out first are staff drinks, comps and freebies, and the till not matching the count. Get the kitchen transfers on paper and you might find a good chunk of your "missing" stock was in the gravy all along.
Common questions
How should a pub record drink used in the kitchen?
On a transfer sheet at the point it's taken, in bar units, valued at cost ex VAT. The total comes off the bar's stock result and goes on the kitchen's purchases.
Why does cooking wine show as a stock loss?
Because the bar count only knows what came in, what was sold and what's left. Anything that left without going through the till looks missing, and many reports value it at selling price, so £6 of wine can show as £28 of loss.
Should kitchen transfers be valued at cost or selling price?
At cost, ex VAT. It's an internal move of stock, not a sale. Valuing it at selling price inflates the kitchen's cost and still leaves the bar's numbers wrong.
How much beer does beer batter use?
Published recipes use roughly 150ml to 230ml for four portions, so 38ml to 58ml a portion. Sixty portions a week is roughly 4 to 6 pints.
Sources
- 230ml of ale for four fillets: Deliciously Yorkshire, beer battered fish. 150ml of beer for four: GoodtoKnow, beer battered fish. Both checked 31 October 2026.
- £5.99 wholesale house red and mulling costs: my mulled wine guide (free-trade wholesaler, October 2026). £6.50 for a 175ml glass is the illustrative price from my wine by the glass guide.
- £5.34 average pint and £2.45 gross profit, so about £2.00 cost ex VAT: my electricity cost per pint guide. About £2.20 a pint for Guinness: my Guinness guide.
- Fish volume, wine bottles a week, £5,000 bar takings and £2,500 food sales are illustrative inputs, not survey figures. Every total in the table is my own arithmetic, so put your own numbers in.