Price of beer in pubs

In message , Douglas Clark wrote

Not beer prices, but for comparison the rpi for around the last 90 years can be found at:

There is a link to a graph at the bottom of the page

1976 - University of Aston in Birmingham Student Union -

Aston Ale 30p, lagerade and Guinness 31p.

I can't recall food prices (they weren't as important :-)

In message , Steven Pampling writes

In Chester in 1974 mild was 12p and bitter was 14p. Most of it was keg; we were grateful for Banks' in the countryside at the same price. The

1p difference between the saloon and the public still meant something then, just about.

I remember refusing to drink in the bar of the Derwent Hotel, Torquay because the keg "Double Diamond" was 24p a pint; in a pub it would've been about 16p. That was at Easter 1975. There was a geography course on the same field trip; I went back to the bar after closing for something I'd forgotten and there was John Cryne -

Er. Um. Beer prices were shooting up in the 70s like everything else though. In about 1977, passing through Farnham, someone said "Bet lager's 50p a pint here!" meaning it'd be expensive. By the following year that would've been cheap.

In the late seventies when I used to underage drink in the Hare and Hounds in Hastings (now long gone), a pint of Whitbread was 66p. We used to have a pint and a half, and the evening's drinking still gave us change from a pound.

Happy days.....

Yes, that was something I was trying to reconcile in my mind - I recall the start of drinking IN pubs back in 1974 (or possibly 73) and the price per pint was the same as the maximum bus fare which at the time was 15p

Maximum fare hasn't got to the current beer price at present, despite fuel costs.

I was about to say that Double Diamond was a pretty good reason for not drinking, then you threw in the reason to avoid pubs :-)

I also remembered why I remembered the price difference on the beers in the student union - the Aston Ale was the same price as lager and I avoided lager, so until the Real Ale bar opened in the cellar Steve Parry and I drank upstairs in the second floor. Since Guiness was one penny more than the lager he was drinking he kept score and every 31 pints I had to buy an extra round. Those who know Steve of old will now be laughing and recalling a number of other similar incidents.

I do not have exact figures or quotes but surely the only real comparison can be how many hours/minutes a specific common type worker such as building labourer has to work to buy a pint.

Building labourer? At the moment, that calculation would tend towards infinity.

In article , Steven Pampling writes

A pint cost that much at the student union bar at Queen's in Belfast around that time.

Bad choice maybe, I'm not up to speed with that work thing these days.

Are you sure about this? I started drinking about the same year (63) and can remember (*) paying about 1 shilling 5 pence (63 being pre-decimal) for a pint (of bitter) on Merseyside. This equates to just over 7p. I can't imagine Yorkshire would be nearly twice as expensive as Merseyside. Even 5 or so years later a so called "premium" (ie keg) beer was

2 shillings 6 pence which is 12.5p.

Malcolm

(*) Being the 60's, I don't guarantee my memory either...

For many years a Mars bar kept level with inflation and was regularly used to equate to cost.

Of course, like everything else, they had to change the size.

There again, THEY have to change things usually for the sake of change.

Just who THEY are is impossible to discover but they have a lot to answer for.

To add another data point to the graph, when I left Uni (Salford) in

1992, it was still possible to get a pint of Holts Mild in a Holts pub for 86p. M

I recall my local charged 12.5 pence a pint for Home Bitter in 1973. My wife drank halves and the landlord charged 6.5 pence for the first half , 6 pence for the next and so on.None of the present day rounding up for him.

In message , Alan wrote

Some more prices from the 1950s - off licence prices

Priced per dozen

(Peterborough) AUTUMN 1951 Guinness, Harp label 12/- halves - 22/- pints Nut Brown 16/6 pints Carlsberg 15/- halves Grahams Golden Lager (Skol) 11/6

XMAS 1953 Guinness = same price Nut Brown = 17/- Carlsberg = same price Skol (GGL) 12/-