Running a brewery · 10 min read · 8 October 2026

Kombucha cost per bottle: costing a batch you can price from

Most producers know what a bottle sells for. What it cost to make is harder to pin down, and the gap between those two numbers is where a busy brewery can quietly lose money.

The first price usually comes from the shelf: what other brands charge, minus what the shop and the distributor take. That tells you what the market will pay. It does not tell you whether you make anything at it. This guide builds the cost of one bottle from the bottom up, in the order the money is spent, and then works back from a shelf price to see what is left for you.

Start with what went into the tank

Ingredients are the line everyone costs first. They are also the easiest line to get exactly right, because every price is already on an invoice.

Price from your invoices, per stock unit. What you paid per kilo of tea, per kilo of sugar, per litre of juice, delivery included. A supplier's current price list is not what this batch cost.
Price every line, including the small ones. The acid you adjust with, the water treatment, the botanical that only one flavour uses. A missing price is not zero. One unpriced ingredient makes the total unknown, not cheaper, and a cost that quietly leaves something out is exactly the one that makes a product look profitable when it is not.
Cost each flavour on its own. Tea and sugar are usually a small share of a bottle's cost. A juice or fruit addition can cost more than both together, which is why two flavours from the same base rarely cost the same.
Keep the cost a batch was brewed at. When sugar goes up in March, February's batches still cost what they cost. Recosting old batches at today's prices quietly rewrites every margin you have already reported.

The culture is an ingredient too

A batch pitched with liquid starter draws on tea, sugar and tank time that were spent weeks earlier. That starter has a cost, and it belongs to the batches it goes into.

Charge the pitch. Litres of starter pitched, times what a litre of that starter cost to make. Leave it out and the base looks cheaper than it was, by roughly the share you pitched.
A flavoured product owes its share of the base. When one base ferment is split into several flavours, each carries the part of the base's cost that matches the volume it took, plus its own additions. Together the shares never come to more than the whole base, and base you hold back as starter is charged to the batch it is pitched into, not to the flavours.

Cost per litre in, cost per litre out

A recipe is costed on the litres that go into the tank. You sell the litres that come out, and they are never the same number. Liquid stays behind with the sediment and the pellicle, some is lost in every transfer and on the filler, a few bottles fail their check, and samples are kept back. The cost of the batch belongs on the litres you actually packaged.

Use your measured yield. Litres packaged divided by litres in. If 500 litres went in and 440 came out as product, the yield is 88 percent, and every litre you sell costs about 14 percent more than the recipe sheet says.
Use several batches, not the best one. The median of your last few completed batches is a figure you can price from. A single batch is an anecdote, and the good one is the one everybody remembers.
Watch it move. A yield that drifts down over a few months often has a specific cause: a longer transfer hose, a filler that needs adjusting, a flavour that leaves more behind. It is cheaper to find than to price around.

The package often costs more than the drink

For a bottled product, the container, the closure and the label together often cost more than the liquid inside them. Cost them per bottle filled.

The container. Bottle or can at your invoice price, plus the share that breaks on the line.
The closure and the label, including the neck tag or second label that one product carries and another does not.
The shares. The carton or tray, its dividers and the pallet wrap, divided over the bottles they carry.
Deposits. A deposit you charge and later refund passes through you and is not a cost of the bottle. What costs you is around it: a deposit scheme's fees and markings on single-use containers, and the returnable bottles and crates that never come back, less the deposit you kept on them.

Returnable kegs are a different calculation, because the container is yours and comes back. The cost there is the fleet, the cleaning and the kegs that go missing, spread over the fills. A one-way keg is packaging, costed per fill.

Your hours, and everything you pay anyway

These are the two lines most often left out, and at small scale, together, they are often the largest part of the cost.

Put a rate on your own time. Brew day, transfers, flavouring, filling, cleaning, and the records that go with all of them. If you do not pay yourself yet, use what it would cost to employ someone to do the work, not just their hourly wage. A price that only works while you work for free stops working the day you hire.
Count the overheads. Rent, heating or cooling the fermentation room, water, cleaning chemicals, insurance, lab tests, audit and certification fees, software, the van, and the hours that belong to no single batch: selling, deliveries, invoicing, stock counts. Add them up per month and spread them over the litres you actually make in a month, not the litres your tanks could make.
Expect the overhead per bottle to move with volume. The same rent over half the litres doubles that line on every bottle. This is why a quiet month is expensive, and why a price set in a busy month can be too low for the rest of the year.

A worked example

Round numbers, chosen to be easy to follow rather than to match any market. Replace every figure with your own before you use the method.

A 500 litre batch with a measured yield of 88 percent, so 440 litres packaged into about 1,330 bottles of 330 ml.

Liquid. Tea, sugar and water treatment at €0.16 a litre, the starter pitched at €0.04 (a fifth of the tank, at what its own tea and sugar cost), the flavour at €0.30. That is €0.50 a litre into the tank, €250 for the batch, and about €0.19 per bottle once the 12 percent loss is counted.
Packaging. Bottle, cap, label and the carton share at €0.45 per bottle.
Hours. 16 hours across brew day, flavouring, filling, cleaning and records, at €25 an hour, is €400 for the batch, or €0.30 per bottle.
Overheads. €1,500 a month over four batches is €375 for this one, or €0.28 per bottle.

The full cost is about €1.22 per bottle, and the kombucha itself is less than a sixth of it. Before hours and overheads, the same bottle costs €0.64.

Work back from the shelf price

Now start at the other end. Suppose the bottle sells for €2.90 on the shelf, before VAT. Each business between you and the shelf takes its margin out of its own selling price.

Through a shop that keeps 35 percent of its selling price, the shop pays you about €1.89. You keep €0.67 a bottle.
Through a distributor to the same shop, keeping 25 percent of its own price, the distributor pays you about €1.41. You keep €0.19.
Direct, at a market, from your own taproom or online, you keep more of the €2.90, but selling direct has its own costs: the stall, the card fees, the shipping, the hours behind the counter.

The same bottle at the same shelf price earns three and a half times as much through a shop as through a distributor. Distributors bring a reach you cannot build alone. The point is to know this number before you sign, and to check that the distributor price clears the full cost, not just the €0.64.

Margin and markup are not the same number. A shop that wants a 35 percent margin is not asking for 35 percent on top of your price: adding 35 percent to €1.89 gives €2.55, not €2.90. When someone quotes you a percentage, ask which one they mean. Margins also vary widely by country, channel and size of account, so these figures show the method, not what to expect. Ask each buyer for theirs.

Three numbers to keep for every product

The full cost per bottle, with hours and overheads. The regular price in every channel has to clear it, with room for the bad batch and the slow month.
The cost before hours and overheads, which is close to what one more batch costs you when the hours are your own and the rent is paid anyway. It is the floor for a one-off, such as a large order that fills tanks that would otherwise stand empty. It is never the regular price.
The margin per bottle in each channel. A channel that sells a lot at a thin margin can be worth less than it looks, and the only way to see that is per channel, not on average.

Keeping the number honest

Recost forward when something real changes. A supplier's price, a new recipe version, a different bottle, a yield that has moved.
Compare the plan with the batch. The recipe says what a litre should cost, and the finished batch says what it did. A gap that keeps showing up is usually over-dosing, a loss nobody wrote down, or a price that was never updated.
Look every month, not every year. Revenue against the cost of what you sold, month by month, shows a margin being squeezed while there is still time to act, rather than in the annual accounts.

Frequently asked questions

Should I put a price on my own time if I do not pay myself?

Yes. Leave it out and the price only works while you work for free. The day you hire someone, or simply want to be paid, the margin you counted on is gone. Use what it would cost to employ a person for the same work.

Why does my cost per litre change from batch to batch?

Because the inputs do. Yield differs a little each time, an ingredient bought at a new price reaches some batches and not others, a flavour dose varies, and the month's overheads are spread over a different volume. Price from the median of several recent batches, and look into any single batch that sits well outside it.

What margin should a kombucha brewery aim for?

There is no single right figure: it depends on the channel, the volume and how much of your own time is in the cost. The useful test is whether each channel's regular price clears the full cost per bottle with room left for a bad batch, a dropped pallet and a slow month. If a channel only clears the cost before hours and overheads, your other channels are paying for it.

BrauMo costs a recipe per litre from your own stock prices and names any ingredient that has no price yet, instead of counting it as free. Yield is measured from the recipe's own packaged batches, so the cost per saleable litre comes from your history rather than a guess. A batch's cost is read at the prices it was booked at, with its share of the culture pitched and, for a flavoured product, of the base. The sales report then sets cost per bottle, including a packaging cost you enter once, against the average price each product actually sold at. Your hours and overheads stay yours to add. See the features →