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Bartender Pour Tips: Flow Rates, Bands and a Two-Stage Routine

Updated October 2026

Bartender Pour looks like a reflex test, but most rounds are lost to planning, not to slow fingers. The game gives you one bottle, four glasses and sixty seconds, and it only counts a round when every glass sits inside its band at the same moment. This guide lays out the exact numbers the game uses for flow speed and tolerance, explains how your finger position is read, and turns that into a pouring routine that holds up as the rounds get faster.

What a round actually asks for

Each round deals four glasses with a dashed target line somewhere between 30 and 92 percent of the glass height. The lines are placed at least two and a half band-widths apart from each other, so no two glasses ever share a target, and their left-to-right order is shuffled. Around each line is a translucent box: that box is the band. While a glass is below the band, its liquid is orange and the box is reddish. The moment the level is inside, the liquid, the box and the line all turn green.

Only going over the top of the box hurts you. A glass that is short can always be topped up, but the instant any glass rises past the upper edge of its band it is marked with a red cross, the whole round is thrown away and, after a pause of 0.8 seconds, four fresh glasses appear. Your round number does not change and nothing is subtracted; you have simply spent time. A cleared round adds one point, waits 0.6 seconds and moves you to the next round.

The numbers behind each round

Flow is measured in glasses per second. In round 1 the bottle fills 0.42 of a glass every second, so an empty glass would take about 2.4 seconds to fill to the brim. Every cleared round adds 0.045 to that rate, up to a ceiling of 1.2 glasses per second, which is reached in round 19. The band starts at plus or minus 5.8 percent of the glass height and narrows by 0.35 points per round until it stops at plus or minus 2.5 percent in round 11.

Dividing the band width by the flow rate gives the time window during which a single continuous pour is inside the band:

A typical human reaction to a visual cue is well over 150 milliseconds, so from roughly round 5 onward you cannot watch a long pour and stop it by sight. The only reliable way through is to stop early on purpose and finish with small, controlled additions.

How the game reads your finger

The glasses occupy the lower part of the play area, from 40 to 95 percent of its height, and each one is a tall rectangle about a quarter of the width. You do not need to touch the liquid or the rim: any point inside a glass's rectangle pours into that glass. Between neighbouring glasses there is a thin strip, about 1 percent of the screen width, where nothing pours.

The amount poured is measured by how long your finger actually stays on a glass, not by how many times the screen redraws, and the level is judged at the moment you lift. That means a slow phone and a fast one give exactly the same result for the same touch: a tap of 50 milliseconds adds about 2 percent of a glass in round 1 and about 6 percent at the top flow rate, whatever the screen's refresh rate. Even the narrowest band, 5 percent in total width, is about 42 milliseconds of flow, so short, deliberate taps are precise enough at every stage of the game.

The pour follows your finger, which is convenient but also dangerous. If you drag from the leftmost glass to the rightmost one, the two glasses in between receive liquid for every moment your finger spends crossing them. If one of them is already green, that stray dose can push it over. Lift, move, and touch down again whenever the path would cross a finished glass.

A two-stage pouring routine

Think of every glass as two jobs: a bulk fill and a finish. For the bulk fill, hold until the level is clearly below the bottom of the box, roughly one box-height short, then release. There is no penalty for stopping low, so be generous with the margin. Do the bulk fill for all four glasses first, working across the row in one direction so that your finger never doubles back over a glass that is close to done.

Then go back for the finish. Tap each glass in short bursts until it turns green and stop at the first flash of colour. Because the band is centred on the line, entering it from below leaves you about a full band-width of room before the glass is ruined, which is much more forgiving than trying to land on the line itself. Green is green: the game does not reward accuracy within the band, so the lower edge is as good as the line.

Keep an eye on the round as a whole. A glass that is green stays green unless you pour into it again, so after the finish pass the round clears as soon as the last glass turns green, with no extra input required.

Budgeting sixty seconds

The clock runs on real time from the start of the game and keeps running if you switch apps, so there is no pausing to think. The four targets average a little over 60 percent each, which means a round needs roughly 2.4 glasses of liquid in total. At round 1 flow that is close to six seconds of pure pouring; by round 10 it is around three seconds, and at maximum flow about two.

We wrote a small simulation of the round logic to see what a perfect pourer could achieve. A bot with no reaction error, about 0.15 seconds spent moving between glasses and a careful top-up step cleared a median of 11 rounds in 60 seconds, with 12 as its best. Adding random stopping errors of about 30 milliseconds lowered the median to 9, and errors of about 60 milliseconds lowered it to 7. In practice this means that scores in the low teens are near the ceiling, and that each ruined round costs you far more than the pause itself, because the liquid you had already poured is lost with it.

Common mistakes

The most expensive habit is chasing the line. Players treat the dashed line as the target and keep pouring after the glass has already turned green, which turns a cleared glass into a ruined round. The second is the long drag across the row described above. The third is fixing a glass that is fine: a level resting near the top of its band looks risky, but it cannot rise on its own, so leave it alone and spend the time on the glasses that are still orange.

Finally, watch where your finger lands when a new round appears. If your finger is still down over a glass as the new set is dealt, pouring starts immediately on that glass. Lift between rounds and start each one with a fresh touch.

A short practice plan

  1. Play three games where you only do bulk fills and stop deliberately low, then finish with taps. Ignore the score and count how many glasses you ruin; the target is none.
  2. Next, time your bulk fills more tightly so that each glass needs only two or three finishing taps.
  3. Once rounds 1 to 8 feel routine, practise the lift-and-move habit until you never drag across a finished glass.

Your best result is saved on your device, and any score above zero can be submitted to the Hall of Fame from the time-up card.

▶ Play Bartender Pour Fill four glasses to four lines before the minute is up.