A cellar flow monitor counts every pint through every line, to the tenth, because the brewery reconciles it against the till. Line 3 pours four pints between three and four in the morning, the till has nothing, the barrel goes down by four pints, and the bar is locked.
I run a village pub. Twelve years, tied to a brewery, with a cellar that is monitored whether I like it or not.
How the monitoring works.
Each beer line from cellar to bar passes through a flow meter, which counts the volume through it and reports to a box on the wall, which reports to the brewery. The till reports what was sold. The brewery's system lays one over the other and sends me a report: line 3, so many pints poured, so many sold, so many unaccounted.
Unaccounted pints are line cleaning, spillage, and staff drinking, and a landlord who runs high on them gets a visit.
Mine run low. I clean lines on a Tuesday morning and the report shows exactly that.
Line 3 pours four pints between three and four in the morning, most nights, and nothing goes through the till, because the bar is locked, the lights are off, and I am upstairs.
Four pints, near enough. Three point eight to four point two, which is four pulls of a handpump with the sparkler on.
Line 3 is the bitter, and the pump is a handpull, which means the beer only moves if somebody pulls the handle. There is no gas on it. It cannot pour itself.
What has been checked.
The meter. The brewery's technician replaced it in 2021, and the box on the wall in 2022. Same.
The barrel. This is the check that took it out of the category of a faulty meter. A cask on stillage can be dipped, and I dipped line 3's cask at closing and again at seven on eleven mornings.
The cask goes down by about four pints overnight on the nights the meter says it does, and on the nights the meter says nothing, the cask is where I left it.
The line and the pump. A leak would pour beer on the cellar floor, or the bar floor, and there is no beer on either. The pump is a handpull with a check valve and it does not drip, and I have put a glass under the spout overnight and it is dry in the morning.
The doors. The bar has a door to the cellar steps and a door to the house, and both are locked at close and unlocked by me. Nobody else has a key. There is a camera in the bar because the brewery asked for one, and the camera sees the pump.
The camera.
I have watched the bar between three and four on nine of those nights.
Nothing moves. The handle on line 3 stays up. There is nobody in the bar and the doors are shut.
The meter in the cellar underneath, on those same nights, counts four pints through a line whose only outlet is that handle.
What that means.
Beer leaves the cask, goes up the line, through the meter, and arrives at a pump whose handle does not move, and the beer is not in a glass on the bar and not on the floor, and four pints of it are gone.
I have written that sentence in an email to the brewery once, and the reply was a very kind note from my area manager suggesting that the pump's check valve be replaced, which it was, and which changed nothing.
What is done about it.
The brewery's report shows four unaccounted pints a night on line 3 and the report flags a pattern, and my area manager and I have an understanding, which is that my cellar is otherwise the tightest on his patch and he has stopped mentioning it.
It costs me about six pounds a night at cost. I have never charged anybody for it and I have never claimed it back.
What I do.
I dip the casks, I clean the lines, I lock up.
The one thing I have changed is where I stand to pull line 3.
The bar is L shaped and line 3 is on the short leg, and behind it, on the wall, there is a mirror that has been there since before my time, the old brewery kind with the lettering.
You pull a pint of bitter with your back to that mirror. Everyone does. The handle is a long pull and you lean into it.
I pull line 3 from the side now, standing at the end of the bar, at an angle that makes the pull awkward and that a customer once asked me about, and I said the handle was stiff.
The reason is a night in 2022 when I was clearing up at twenty to three with the lights on low and I pulled myself a half from line 3 before bed, which I do, and as I leaned into the pull I could see the mirror over my shoulder, and in it the handle was already down, all the way, before my hand had moved it, and something was holding it there.