Excellent cocktails typically aren’t cheap. Your local dive with beer-stained pool tables and neon signs touting budget macro beers can likely whip up a basic Old Fashioned at a reduced price, but capacity does not equal quality. The adage “you get what you pay for” can ring even truer in these situations, but knowing this takes the sting of shelling out $20 for a properly made tipple.
At the same time, the curiosity of what drives the costs may linger. Some of the economics of a Martini or a Manhattan, like high-end spirits and overhead, make sense on a surface level. But dig a little deeper, and some sneaky cost influencers start to emerge. Here are the ingredients that could be driving up the price of your cocktail.
Limes and Other Citrus
It’s no secret that using fresh juices and syrups were crucial to the cocktail revival in the early 2000s, and they still are. But utilizing the fruit to make these ingredients comes at a cost that continues to increase. The sole ounce of citrus juice needed for a Daiquiri or a Bee’s Knees may seem like a negligible cost, but those ounces add up, which can mean inflicting the economic equivalent of death by a thousand paper cuts on a bar program if they don’t adjust menu prices accordingly.
“It’s tough when a bar is hinging their cocktails on the nuances of juices and the prepping of raw materials,” explains Ash Miyazaki, lead bartender at The Let’s Go! Disco & Cocktail Club in Los Angeles. “The cost of a specific spirit can have a higher impact on the cost of an individual cocktail, but limes are a multi-purpose ingredient for several cocktails, so it can have a bigger impact on a cocktail program overall. This means it can have a huge overarching effect on costs.”
Spirits in Short Supply
While a single spirit may not have the same blanket impact on a program like citrus proper, economic chaos can ensue if a bottle suddenly becomes nearly impossible to obtain and the principles of supply and demand manifest. When the Carthusian monks began limiting production of green Chartreuse in 2021, they sparked a shortage that somewhat gave them the final say on how many Last Words a bar could crank out.
“If we have limited access to a spirit, we’ll take it off the menu. Guests can ask for the cocktail, but we’ll tell them up front that we have to modify it for these reasons.”
“The green Chartreuse shortage drove some important decisions,” explains Eliza Hoar, bar principal at Equal Measure in Boston. “Do you increase the price of cocktails using it? Do you look for substitutions? Do you change the specs of an existing drink?”
A shortage of a specialized bottle like green Chartreuse may go unnoticed by guests who aren’t as dialed into the cocktail scene, but a bottle from a mainstream category like rum may not have that luxury. In Washington, D.C., Service Bar was grappling with the effects of the growing shortage of Wray & Nephew Overproof Rum. Its eventual solution? 86 a drink that specifically called for the Jamaican elixir from its menu. This decision didn’t lead to a price increase, but it did carry an impact on the customer — the drink turned from menu item to memory.
“We’re very transparent with our guests,” explains Service Bar’s head bartender and partner Christine Kim. “If we have limited access to a spirit, we’ll take it off the menu. Guests can ask for the cocktail, but we’ll tell them up front that we have to modify it for these reasons. Fortunately, they understand.”
Pineapple
The impact of climate change also reveals an inconvenient truth about a cocktail’s cost. Hotter temperatures can shorten growing seasons, thus reducing quality and yield, which can lower market supply and increase ingredient costs. This year, your Piña Colada or Painkiller might be feeling the pain: Disruptions to anticipated rainfall in Costa Rica and Mexico caused issues with pineapple supply and quality in 2024. This could potentially make it tough for classic tiki or modern tropical bars to keep their drink prices down, since so many of the genre’s cocktails rely on pineapple usage.
Rhubarb
The climate’s influence can be even more profound when hyper-seasonal ingredients are considered. 2024’s mercurial weather patterns particularly impacted the availability of rhubarb during its brief late spring-early summer window. For a place like Service Bar, which likes to play around with the tart, stalk-like fruit when the time is right, this lack of access and quality limited its ability to fully experiment with rhubarb’s unique flavor profile as it normally would.
Regional Produce
Regionality can also play a factor in a bar’s ability to access specific ingredients at certain times, so if you spot a fruit or vegetable that never hit your local grocery store, it’s a lot more expensive to track down. It’s something Hoar experienced firsthand: Prior to her current stint at Equal Measure, she oversaw the bar program at Youngblood in San Diego, where sunshine and milder weather typically lead to extended growing seasons. “Climate change impacts the seasons a lot,” she says. “Speaking as someone that moved from the West Coast to the East Coast, it’s been incredible seeing the difference in produce availability.”
Hoar also notes that climate change may be forcing an evolution to these seasonal windows, which could cause collateral damage that could further affect cocktail prices down the road. “You can taste the difference in the ingredients when the seasons flip, and I feel like there’s been a shift in this seasonality,” she says. “These shifts can have an impact on an ingredient’s availability and quality.”
Time
The sneakiest ingredients driving a cocktail’s cost often don’t find their way into the glass at all.
“Time is a huge, invisible, and expensive ingredient,” Miyazaki says. “Daily bar prep can take hours, even if you’re using equipment like taplines or a centrifuge to cut down on the time it takes to batch, bottle, or keg drinks. This time requires labor, and a bar will want to check all the boxes when it comes to taking care of their labor. This includes paying them a fair, livable wage, hopefully with benefits.”
“We are running a business, so that requires us making conscious decisions. Ultimately, we want to be profitable without having to gouge our customers.”
Conversations concerning these clandestine costs don’t happen too frequently between bartenders and guests. But when they do, guests are usually understanding if not a bit empathetic. “Our customers are more sympathetic when we talk to them,” explains Miyazaki. “They tend to be more receptive about the time and effort that goes into making their cocktail.”
Being willing to engage in these conversations whenever they do bubble up to the surface points to another sneaky ingredient that has nothing to do with the cost of a cocktail. The secret sauce of a successful bar is the community it creates. The cost of limes or the scarcity of a bottle may add a dollar or two to a cocktail’s prices, but this bump helps make it possible for a bar to be a third place in someone’s life.
“We’re a neighborhood bar first and a cocktail bar second. We’re about building community,” says Kim. “But we are running a business, so that requires us making conscious decisions. Ultimately, we want to be profitable without having to gouge our customers.”
Eventually, these sneaky ingredients driving up cocktail costs may not be as devilish as they are now. The cost of citrus may drop. Spirits that are currently tough to get may once again flood the market in a flourish. If and when that happens, bartenders are prepared to pass whatever savings they may receive as a result to the consumer.
“We’ll adjust our cocktail prices down for sure,” Kim says. “We’re not a*sholes.”
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