Recently Sky News ran a poll on Twitter asking what was a reasonable price to pay for a pint of beer or lager. The majority opted for the £6-7 option, higher priced options were available.
For some, particularly those drinking in large cities and who don’t frequent Wetherspoons, this might seem an obvious answer. You can certainly pay more for stronger beers but you will probably drink them in smaller measures- a half or two-thirds of a pint. For a 4-5% beer you might expect to pay the £6-7.
Of course you can pay less and cask beer in particular remains in some cases lower priced (much to the chagrin of brewers who don’t have lower production costs but have to sell their beer). Its quite possible for example to get a pint of well kept cask beer in central London for under £5 a pint and around the UK it might be significantly less.
An interesting analysis of the state of craft beer in the Guardian (8th April) notes that beer prices can seem ‘scary’ particularly if you are buying a round. It also notes that sales of craft beer remain decent,even if Big Beer is forever encroaching on sales.
The issue is to sell the beer at a reasonable price that won’t put people off but also allows the brewer a profit margin.
By profit here we should be talking about not the super profits of Big Beer, but a ‘normal’ profit. That is one that pays for costs of material and production and wages and gives the brewer a living income.
That was the formula set the the Assizes of Ale and Bread (see above) before the market took complete control in the early 1800s. The market was regulated.
Labour is promising to do something around this, grasping that the market alone works for the few not the many. The issue and one that needs to be discussed and promoted is what an effective intervention in the market might be
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/apr/08/uk-craft-beer-sector-financial-hurdles
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