Why wouldn't you just sell the liquor like normal? Extra profit on top of your ill-gotten gains.

You need a paper trail of invoices, both of you buying sufficient supplies and having sufficient sales to customers to warrant those supplies.

The amount of money you can launder in a given period of time is ultimately limited by how much real business you have. So if you need to launder an excessive amount of money eventually you’ll have to start metaphorically or literally pouring alcohol down the drain.

You would, actually. But you need to somehow account for revenue above and beyond the amount of liquor you’ve actually served. So my hypothesis is that money laundering bars just pour stronger drinks than fully legitimate ones, or tolerate more “shrinkage” in general.

(According to a bar manager I once knew, bars inherently have higher shrinkage than other businesses anyway; in bartending, you don’t get fired for stealing the occasional bottle or giving away free drinks to your friends because every bartender will do one of those, but if you do both you will get fired. I don’t consider this guy a reliable source, but it seems plausible; stevedores were notorious for liquor theft prior to the invention of shipping containers, so why not bartenders?)