Cellar management basics: the routine, and what each shortcut costs

Search "cellar management" and you'll mostly find course adverts. £30 for a certificate that says you watched some videos. The actual job is a short routine done on time, and every corner cut has a price on it that turns up in your stocktake, not in the cellar. This is the routine I run, with the numbers attached, so you can see what each shortcut actually costs.

Temperature: 11 to 13 degrees, and hold it there

Cask Marque's standard is a cellar at 11–13°C. Lager and keg products want 5–8°C at the tap, which the remote cooler and python handle on the way up, and anything sold as extra cold is chilled to 0–5°C. The cellar itself stays at 11–13 whatever you sell.

Run warm and cask life shortens, beer fobs at the tap and you pour money into the drip tray. Run cold and the cooling bill climbs while the cask ale goes cloudy with chill haze. A cellar cooler already draws roughly 500 to 900 kWh a month, which at 2026 commercial rates of 21–24p is £105 to £216 a month before you've sold a drop, so the thermostat is not the place to improvise. Buy a £10 min-max thermometer, check it daily, and stop trusting the dial on the cooler. The full energy arithmetic is in the electricity cost per pint guide.

The cask clock starts at the delivery door

Cask has a timetable and it isn't negotiable. Off the Cask Marque cellar card, which is the standard the assessors audit against:

• Check the best-before date has at least 14 days left before you sign for the delivery
• Hold a minimum of three days' stock when a new delivery arrives
• Once a cask is vented, tap it within two days
• Once it's on sale, empty it within three days

A firkin is 72 pints on paper, and that timetable is why nobody honest budgets for all 72. Sediment takes the bottom of the cask, and the three-day window takes whatever you couldn't sell in time. If your sales can't empty a firkin in three days, order pins or drop a line, because slow cask is expensive cask. Your stock system should assume the real yield, not the brochure yield, or every count shows a phantom deficit. I've covered keg and cask calibration separately, and it's the single most common setup mistake I see.

Line cleaning: every seven days, no debates

Clean beer lines at least every seven days. That's the Cask Marque line and it's not ambitious, it's the floor. Vianet's dispense data, published with Cask Marque, found 27% of beer is served through lines outside the seven-day window. That's not a hygiene lecture, it's a sales problem: beer through a tired line tastes wrong, and regulars don't complain, they just drink somewhere else.

Cleaning has a stock cost, and it belongs in your wastage log, not in your variance. A 10 metre run of 3/8 inch python holds about 1.25 pints, and you push it out with the cleaning water every week, per line. Log it when you clean and your stocktake explains itself. Don't log it and you'll chase a "loss" that's actually Tuesday morning. The full sums, including what a year of cleaning costs at different line counts, are in the beer line cleaning and variance guide.

Gas: the right mix, and watch for the hiss

Wrong gas ruins good beer slowly enough that you'll blame the brewery. Straight CO2 suits lager, cider and postmix. Stout wants 30/70 mixed gas, and a lot of craft keg pours best on 60/40. A 6.35kg CO2 cylinder shifts roughly 1,200 pints, which works out near 3.3p of gas in every pint, so gas is not where your margin is leaking unless a cylinder is leaking. Soapy water on the connections once a month finds a hiss that empties bottles surprisingly fast. Cylinder prices and the per-pint arithmetic are in the cellar gas cost guide.

Rotation, and the log that saves your count

Oldest stock forward, every delivery, no exceptions for the shelf that's awkward to reach. Date-check the soft drinks and bottled lines while you're down there, because out-of-date stock is a write-off you chose by not turning round.

And keep the wastage log in the cellar, on the wall or in your phone, because a cellar event that isn't logged becomes an unexplained loss at the count. A keg that blew foamy, a cask returned as ullage, a line clean, a dropped crate: logged, they're housekeeping. Unlogged, they look like theft, and you end up suspecting people who did nothing. If a cask does go off on you, your supplier credit route is covered in the ullage and wastage claims guide.

The routine on one page

The cellar routine with the cost of skipping it. Figures sourced in the text.

When	Job	What skipping it costs
Daily	Check and record cellar temperature	Fobbing, short cask life, cloudy ale
Daily	Walk the lines and connections	A slow gas leak, flat beer by Friday
Every delivery	Check dates, rotate oldest forward	Write-offs you signed for
Weekly	Clean every line, log the waste	27% of beer through tired lines; phantom variance
Weekly	Vent and tap to the cask timetable	Casks past their best, pints lost off the yield
Monthly	Soapy-water test on gas connections	Cylinders emptying themselves at £40 a time

Why the stocktake is the cellar's report card

Here's the bit the certificate courses skip. Vianet's numbers say 61% of pubs miss their target pouring yield, and 2% of drinks poured never reach the till at all. You will not see either problem by standing in the cellar. You see them in the gap between what the stock says you used and what the till says you sold, which is why I count weekly rather than waiting for a quarterly visit. A tidy cellar with no stock numbers behind it is a well-organised mystery. What normal wastage looks like tells you when the gap is routine, and the DIY stocktake guide covers doing the count yourself in an hour or two.