Everything has gone up in price (blame Covid, Brexit, Boris, the weather or even brewers) but beer seems to have risen the most percentage wise.
Wellington (Shropshire) is still fairly cheap with £3:50 the most you’ll pay for a Cask Ale, although foodie pubs in surrounding countryside have pushed their prices up to £3:80 in one instance I’ve come across.
Telford in general is still OK, Shrewsbury has always been a little more ‘up market’ pub and cost wise, but still no where near some places.
‘Craft Beers’ are expensive everywhere, even here in Shropshire; but I rarely drink those when out, preferring to swill them down at home when no one’s looking!
I’m paying about £4 give or take in Leicester. It’s about that - or maybe a little less - in the Black Country Ales pubs in town. I paid £5.10 the other day but that was for a pint of Ashover Victorian Mild at 7%.
Beer is definitely going up - cask, craft, cans/bottles in the pubs and shops. I’m just going to have to drink less, which I’ve been doing anyway throughout the pandemic.
I should add that in my favourite locals I am happy to pay whatever they feel they need to charge to keep going.
My local is owned by Chantry brewery and their cask beer is £3 a pint regardless of style or ABV, (making their Special Reserve old ale at 6.3% the choice drink of the various heavy hitters who patronise the place).
That’s as cheap as it gets round Sheffield these days. Maybe there’s Abbeydale Moonshine or some other similarly bland stuff in town around the same price. Sam Smith’s have a boozer where there’s probably beer under £3 but whether you’d actually want to sit in there is a different matter.
In Banbury, North Oxfordshire we averaged just over £4 a pint this week. We did a trip round Oxford a couple of weeks back and were paying just under £5 for 4% Bitters!
hard to generalise in the pubs I drink in as there’s more variables than just ABV. £3 - £3.30 probably the going rate for generic/house type beers, high 3s/low 4s for more craft cask I would say. Think the Neepsend pubs are just over the 3 quid mark for their own stuff unless it’s strong, ditto Blue Bee in their own pub (for my money the best two brewers in Sheffield regularly brewing cask - prefer Lost Industry beers but they don’t cask much)
I moved to Sheffield in 2005, having gone through the £2 barrier in Bristol around 2000 I then went through it again here around 2007 I think. £3 seemed outrageous in 2010 when a pub charged that at their fest, but probably around 2014 £3 became the norm for stronger cask beers at least
Not sure if they’ve gone up or not - the few pub visits I’ve done since lockdown ended have either been to have a meal (so haven’t noticed the beer cost in there), or have required card payments only (and I haven’t looked at the price when just waving a card at a machine - dangerous I know!).
Before Covid Wycombe was certainly £3.50-£4 for cask depending on the pub, whilst Reading was starting to see prices over £4 quite commonly. I can certainly see prices going up substantially after all the extra costs pubs have had to bear to make them Covid-safe, plus no doubt increased staff costs due to lack of staff following Brexit.
UPdate on Crewe cask beer prices. Same venue, but today I was charged £3.50 for a 5% beer and £3.95 for a 6% one. So my original guess not too far out.
Edinburgh is now around the £4.00 mark for something like Jarl. I was in Scarborough recently and could get an 8.7% barley wine for the same price at the North Riding Brew Pub!
I was in The Magdala Tavern in Hampstead, NW3 last week and the cask pints that I consumed were all £4.65 per pint which is very reasonable indeed for London.
It is indeed. The Black Dog in Brentford is £4.50 for most if not all the cask ales, but that’s further out than NW3. Here in Chiswick it’s a fiver-plus in the Fuller’s pubs, though many still offer 10% off for us CAMRA members.
Well Mr Fishman, you might be interested to know that today I was in a pub about 5 miles from where you live, and the beer was £2.90 a pint. I also had a very nice beer (but not a tick) in a pub in Shifnal that cost £3.20 a pint. Mind you the prices for craft beer cans in the fridge were shocking. They had one beer which I had ordered direct from the brewery, so I know how much it cost them - the mark-up was about 80% !
