Calculator
Kegs price like cases — with a pour at the end.
Pick a barrel format from the same dropdown you use for six-packs, and the calculator prices the whole keg through all three tiers — then tells you what a single pour costs at the tap.
Pick a barrel format from the same dropdown you use for six-packs, and the calculator prices the whole keg through all three tiers — then tells you what a single pour costs at the tap.
Draft is where package-goods pricing habits go to get confused. A keg has no packs, no units, and its shelf price is a pint glass. Alculator handles this without a separate mode: a keg is just another SKU whose format happens to be a barrel — and the last column quietly switches from price-per-can to price-per-pour.
In the calculator, add a SKU and open its Format dropdown. Below the case formats sit five keg options: ⅙ bbl, ¼ bbl, ½ bbl, 20L, and 50L. Pick one, enter your FOB per keg, and every column reads per-keg — except Retail / Single, which becomes the retail price of one 16 oz pour.
There is no keg panel or special toggle. Click ＋ Add SKU at the bottom of the table (or reuse an existing row), then open the row's Format dropdown — the same one that holds 6×4 and 24×1. The keg formats are listed right alongside them. Choose one and the row recalculates instantly, like every other edit in the calculator.
Two things change the moment you do. The Packs and Units columns both read 1 — a keg is one container that sells as one piece — and the Retail / Single column switches to per-pour pricing (more on that below). The Size dropdown still shows a container size, but for kegs it's cosmetic: the keg's volume comes from the format you picked, not from the Size column.
The three US barrel fractions get top billing, but the dropdown actually holds five formats — the barrels plus two liter kegs for European-style equipment:
| Format | Volume | Fluid ounces | 16 oz pours |
|---|---|---|---|
| ½ bbl keg | 15.5 gal | 1,984 oz | 124 |
| ¼ bbl keg | 7.75 gal | 992 oz | 62 |
| ⅙ bbl keg | ~5.16 gal | 661 oz | ~41 |
| 50L keg | 50 L (~13.2 gal) | 1,690 oz | ~106 |
| 20L keg | 20 L (~5.3 gal) | 676 oz | ~42 |
The half barrel is the full-size keg under most American tap systems; the quarter ("pony") and sixth ("sixtel") are the formats taprooms rotate through faster and self-distributing breweries actually move. If you're deciding which formats belong on your price sheet at all, the channel strategy behind that call lives in On-Premise vs. Off-Premise.
Because a keg's "case" is the keg itself, every per-case column simply reads per-keg. No mental division required:
One honest caveat on that last column: for draft, the "retailer" is usually a bar pricing pints, not a store putting a keg on a shelf. The retail margin field still works the same way — it's the operator's margin on the keg — which is exactly what makes the next column useful.
For keg formats, the Retail / Single column stops meaning "price per can" and shows the retail price of one 16 oz pour — the standard US pint. The calculator divides the keg's full retail price by the number of 16 oz pours it holds: 124 for a half barrel, 62 for a quarter, about 41 for a sixth. Hover the cell and a tooltip confirms the assumption for that row — for example, "124 pours/keg · retail per 16oz pour".
The pour math assumes every ounce reaches a glass. Real draft systems lose beer to foam, line cleaning, and spillage, and many accounts pour 12 oz or 20 oz serves. Treat the per-pour figure as the zero-waste baseline your tap price has to clear — not a promise about yield.
The .99 / .49 rounding toggle applies here too: with rounding on, both the per-keg retail and the per-pour figure snap to price-point endings on screen, while exports and saved data keep the raw values.
There is no keg-specific margin logic anywhere in the engine. A keg row runs through the identical chain as a case row — landed cost, divided by (1 − distributor margin) to get sell-in, divided by (1 − retail margin) to get retail — just with the keg's own cost and a pack of one. Margin-on-price convention, global defaults, and per-SKU overrides all behave exactly as described in Setting Distributor & Retailer Margins.
That includes reverse mode. Flip a keg row to Rev and the Retail / Pack column becomes your input — the target price for the whole keg — and the calculator solves backwards to the FOB that supports it. So if you know what a keg needs to cost a bar in your market, you can start there; the mechanics are in REV Mode. And because kegs are ordinary SKUs, they mix freely with your packaged formats in the same table, count toward the anonymous calculator's 8-SKU cap like any other row, and ride along in every export.
With draft in the model, the rest of the row deserves a closer look:
Open the calculator, add a row, and pick a barrel format — your per-pour number is one FOB away.
Open the Calculator →