Beer prices at festivals

The best scheme I've seen is at Dover where you buy credit card sized laminated tokens for a quid each. Beer is then one token for half a pint, with a few "special" beers where it's two tokens for half a pint. By far the best way to orgainse it. No need to fiddle about with piddly bits of paper.

It makes very little sense to try to sell beers at differential prices in a festival.If you judge your buying correctly you sell nearly all the beer anyway and the amount taken at the end will be the same if you simply charge the same for each. And it's a lot less hassle both for the staff and for the customers. There was a motion passed by CAMRA which tries to make organisers charge according to ABV. At Melton there was no CAMRA budget so we fell outside this and went for a single price. BUT we looked for evidence that the customers were going for the stronger beers because they offered a better bargain.........and no-one found a single example. In fact the initial run was on session bitters and milds!

Why should someone be charged the same for a 3.4% beer as a 4.7% beer? Or to put it another way, why should mild (a threatened drink) drinkers subsidise premium bitter drinkers?

When I went to beer festivals, I always started with the lowest ABV - and never more than a half. That way I had some chance of assessing the stronger stuff later.

Brian

It appears that drinkers of weaker beers are subsidising those drinking stronger ones , but for a start it is often the case that the prices charged by the breweries do not always follow the logical pattern - many are bought on offer for example. But most festival drinkers sample the full range of strengths anyway. We received many comments by customers over the pricing - ALL of them thought it was a great idea.

or, indeed, why should a mild (threatened because no-one likes them) take the space of a premium beer at a festival?

Because you can drink more mild...

I'd rather drink tap water.....

I agree, although very strong cask beers are just as scarce as cask mild, if not more so.

BTN

For the same reason we don't offer Carling but many lager drinkers will try a cask ale - education. Many festival visitors trying a decent mild for the first time will be converts. It is not going to happen overnight but if you don't stock any mild you will never get your punters to try something different.

Have you tried many milds?

But do many people restrict themsleves to a particular %, or do they sample a range? Just think of the extra beer you could drink by adding up all the seconds saved waiting for your 10p change, or finding an odd 10p.

I presume you take the same attitude when you walk into Sainsburys for a loaf of bread and a pint of milk and just round the amount up to the nearest pound. Saves mucking about with change and saves a lot of waiting as you can just drop the correct amount in their hands as you pass the till. I suspect you might get short shrift when asking them to round the amount down to the nearest quid to save you fiddling for change...

Several - at beer festivals over the years. I've found them wishy-washy and not pleasant. I "avoid them like the plague" (c) CAMRA circa 1970s nowadays :-)

I wasn't being entirely serious , although I would rather see more bitters than mild. I went to a small beer festival last year and a good proportion of the drinks on offer were mild.

How do you know they're not logical? I suspect they are, perhaps you're just not acquainted with all the variables.

Point I was making is that when buying beer , sometimes a higher strength ale can be cheaper than another brewery's weaker one. Plus there are any number of promotions , offers and special deals as well so the strength/price correlation is not as clear as you might think.We sold at £2 a pint at Melton - which the locals felt to be good value. Mild is surprisingly well liked by those who actually sample it! There is an image associated with it which puts people off , but offer them some Black Dog or Rutland Panther for example and they will lap it up because they don't realise what it is.

I'm completely the opposite to the original poster here. I go to beer festivals BECAUSE it's the best place to sample a decent range of milds, stouts and porters. Very few pubs put the damn things on these days prefering yet another bitter or premium bitter. Don't get me wrong I have nothing against bitters and premium bitters, it's just that that's all you see in most pubs. I fail to see why pubs bother to put on 5 very similar beers and call it choice. In Edinburgh people tend to put on the latest Caledonian 'special' beer (halloween, 6 nations, summer) and nothing dark :-(

Bill Hewitt wrote in uk.food+drink.real-ale on 13 Oct 2004 13:25:27 GMT MID:

Agreed completely, we've deliberately opted for a "mild night" at many festivals precisely because it's the only place we can sample a range.