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Bar and Beverage Management

HFT4064 — Bar and Beverage Management
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3 credit hours 45 contact hours Prerequisites: Upper-division standing in a hospitality management baccalaureate. Daytona State lists no formal prerequisite, but programs generally expect the hospitality core and, where offered, an introductory beverage or wine course beforehand. Prerequisite structure varies by institution; consult your program's published curriculum plan. v1.0

Course Description

Bar and Beverage Management prepares students to manage beverage operations across hospitality venues. It covers the history of the beverage industry and the appreciation of wine, beer, and spirits, and then moves to the management substance: establishing a bar operation, recruiting and training staff, implementing management and control practices, and executing marketing strategy for a beverage business.

Within the SCNS taxonomy, HFT is the Hospitality Management prefix, and the 4000-level number places this in the senior year of a hospitality baccalaureate. It appears at approximately four Florida institutions, including state colleges with hospitality B.A.S. degrees and major universities. Daytona State offers it fall and spring.

The distinction from the product courses matters. HFT2867 Wine Essentials and its equivalents teach what is in the glass; this course teaches the business the glass sits in. Beverage is where a food and beverage operation makes its margin — pour costs and gross margins on beverage substantially exceed those on food — and it is also where the most theft, waste, and legal exposure occur. A manager who understands product but not control loses money; one who understands control but not product cannot build a program worth selling.

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Special Information

⚠ Florida alcohol law is where a hospitality career actually ends

This is the flag with the most direct career consequence in any beverage course, and it deserves to be concrete rather than general.

Alcohol regulation is amended regularly and local ordinances add hours-of-sale and zoning restrictions on top of state law — rule 11 applies. Verify current requirements with DBPR/ABT rather than relying on a textbook or on this guide.

⚠ Florida's quota license system is a genuine business constraint, and few students know it exists

This is the single most Florida-specific fact in the course and it has direct commercial consequence. Florida limits the number of full liquor licenses by county on a population quota basis under Chapter 561, F.S. Because the supply is capped, existing quota licenses trade on a secondary market, and in populous counties they have historically sold for very substantial sums — a real capital cost of opening a full-liquor establishment, entirely separate from the build-out.

The practical consequences a manager needs to understand:

Licensing categories and thresholds are amended periodically and local ordinances add zoning, hours, and distance restrictions on top — verify current requirements with DBPR rather than relying on this guide.

⚠ Beverage control is where the money leaks, and the leaks are ordinary

Beverage carries the best margins in a food and beverage operation and simultaneously the worst shrinkage. The forms it takes are well documented and unglamorous:

The controls that actually work are procedural rather than punitive: standardized recipes and measured pours, requisition-based issuing from a locked storeroom, regular physical inventory with variance investigated rather than absorbed, and POS discipline requiring every drink to be rung before it is poured. The managerial insight worth carrying: most beverage loss is process failure, not dishonesty, and a manager who treats every variance as theft will damage a team while fixing nothing. Design the system so the honest path is the easy one.

⚠ The staffing reality: this is a people-management course wearing a product-knowledge costume

Students choose this course expecting spirits and cocktails and discover that the job is hiring, training, scheduling, and retaining people in an industry with among the highest turnover rates in the economy. Florida compounds it with sharp seasonality — a Southwest Florida or Keys operation may triple its staffing between summer and season — and with a large tipped workforce whose earnings, scheduling preferences, and legal classification all differ from salaried staff.

Two specifics worth knowing. Tipped wage rules are technical and are enforced: Florida's minimum wage has been rising on a scheduled path under a constitutional amendment, with a corresponding tip credit, and federal rules govern tip pooling and the work a tipped employee may perform at the tipped rate. Getting this wrong produces wage-and-hour liability, and it is one of the more common causes of litigation against restaurants. Verify current Florida minimum wage and tip credit figures — they change annually. And the promoted bartender is the classic failure case: the best bartender is promoted to manager, keeps bartending because it is comfortable and they are good at it, avoids confronting underperformance, and becomes the bottleneck. That transition — from doing the work to getting it done through others — is the actual subject of the management half of this course.

Course format, credits, and contact hours

HFT4064 is a lecture course, 3 credits and approximately 45 contact hours, consistent with this repository's other upper-division HFT courses (HFT3700, HFT4253, HFT4277, all 3/45). Daytona State offers it fall and spring. Expect case-based and quantitative work — pour cost and menu pricing calculations, inventory variance analysis, a beverage program design project, and a budget or P&L exercise — rather than product-identification examinations, which belong to the wine and beverage product courses.

Where the course includes any tasting or product component, the 21-and-over constraint applies as it does in the product courses; confirm with the program if you will be under 21 during the term.

How Florida course levels affect transfer

The first digit of an SCNS number denotes the year of offering, not transferability. Courses at the 1000 and 2000 levels transfer transparently between Florida public institutions, and 3000 to 4000 is unproblematic since both are upper division. The boundary that actually matters is 2000 to 3000, where lower-division credit generally cannot satisfy an upper-division requirement.

Two notes for hospitality students specifically. HFT4064 is upper-division, so a lower-division beverage course such as HFT1270 will not substitute for it. And hospitality B.A.S. degrees are applied — students moving between a B.A.S. and a traditional B.S. in hospitality should have coursework evaluated in writing, since the two are structured differently and do not map course-for-course.

Generated September 2, 2026 · Updated September 2, 2026