Quarter vs Full: the per-litre math nobody does in the queue
Every night, thousands of people stand in a TASMAC queue and choose a bottle size on vibes. The arithmetic takes ten seconds and it always says the same thing — we checked all 237 quarter/full pairs in the catalogue, and there are no exceptions. Why that is, is the interesting part.
The sizes, for the record
TASMAC's spirits come in three standard sizes: Quarter (180 ml), Half (375 ml) and Full (750 ml) — beer plays by its own rules at 650 ml for the standard bottle. Note the Quarter is not actually a quarter of a Full: 180 × 4 is 720, not 750. That missing 30 ml is the first hint that the sizes aren't priced on a straight line either.
One formula settles it
To compare sizes fairly you need one number: the price per litre. ₹/L = MRP × 1000 ÷ ml. Take Old Monk Gold Reserve. The Quarter is ₹230, which works out to 230 × 1000 ÷ 180 = ₹1,278 per litre. The Full is ₹920 — four Quarters' worth of money would be ₹920 too, but the Full carries 750 ml, not 720 — and it comes to 920 × 1000 ÷ 750 = ₹1,227 per litre. The Full is ₹51/L cheaper. Same liquid, same shop, same law-fixed MRP; the only variable is the size of the glass around it.
Run that formula down the catalogue and the pattern holds without a single exception: the Quarter carries a per-litre premium — ₹48/L on average, from ₹20 at the cheap end to ₹176 on the priciest gin. Three examples from the live statewide list:
| Product | Quarter ₹/L | Full ₹/L | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Old Monk Gold Reserve · ₹230 / ₹920 | ₹1,278 | ₹1,227 | Full wins by ₹51/L |
| Mansion House Reserve Brandy · ₹250 / ₹1,000 | ₹1,389 | ₹1,333 | Full wins by ₹56/L |
| Jaisalmer Craft Gin · ₹790 / ₹3,160 | ₹4,389 | ₹4,213 | Full wins by ₹176/L |
Why the Quarter can never win
Here is the part that surprised us when we ran the whole catalogue: every one of the 237 quarter/full pairs is priced at exactly 4× — and every half at exactly 2×. TASMAC's price list is perfectly linear in Quarters. No rounding quirks, no odd pairs, nothing for a bargain-hunter to find. Which means the Full's entire advantage comes from the glass, not the price tag: four Quarters is 720 ml, a Full is 750. You pay the same ₹ per Quarter-equivalent and the big bottle quietly hands you 30 ml more. That is the whole discount — a fixed 4% per litre, on every single product — and it also means the Half, at exactly double the Quarter for 375 ml, lands on the same per-litre number as the Full. Half or Full: identical value. Quarter: always 4% behind.
The bigger exception isn't in the catalogue at all — it's in your evening. ₹/L is only the right metric if you were going to drink the Full anyway. If a Quarter is genuinely the plan, buying a Full to "save" ₹51 a litre means spending ₹690 extra tonight to economise on a hypothetical. Money left in your pocket beats money saved per litre, every time. The Full is a bulk discount; bulk discounts only pay if you use the bulk.
Rule of thumb from the queue: drinking the whole thing tonight or across the week? Buy the Full. Buying for one sitting, one person? The Quarter was never a mistake.
The app does the division for you
Every product page in the app shows ₹/L against every size, computed from the official MRP, and puts a star on the best-value size — so the ten-second calculation becomes a zero-second glance, offline, before you've joined the queue. One footnote on the numbers here: MRPs are fixed statewide by law, so the prices above aren't estimates — but the government revises the list from time to time, and the figures quoted are from the catalogue as of September 2026. The app's copy of all 1,498 products updates when the list does; a two-week-old blog post doesn't.
The per-litre answer is always "buy the Full — or the Half". The honest answer is "buy the size you'll actually drink" — just know what the ₹51 is buying you either way.