Tuesday, April 15, 2025
I saw this poster outside a bar in Hackney.
If you'd seen this a few years ago you'd have assumed they put the prices up during Happy Hour.
Now a five pound pint sounds like a bargain.
How did alcohol in a London pub get so expensive?
I can do a very rough check of beer prices in London by scrolling back through this blog.
• At the 2012 Olympics a pint of lager cost £4.80.
• In 2016 I cringed when a bottle of Becks cost £5.25.
• In 2019 a pint of lager cost £5.95 and I chose not to buy a second.
• In 2021 I bought a round which topped £6 a pint.
• Last week I bought a round which nudged £7 a pint.
Obviously not all pints are this expensive.
The pints in that Hackney bar normally cost £5.90, £6 or £6.20.
If you're comfortable in a Wetherspoons you can still buy lager at 2010 prices.
Also if you step out of the London bubble then pints are significantly cheaper.
The ONS checks the average price of a pint of draught lager nationwide every month.
According to their latest data the UK average price of a pint is £4.80, way less than Londoners pay.
Here's a graph for UK-wide prices going back to 1987.
And here are the years various pint/pound thresholds were crossed.
» £1 a pint in September 1988
» £2 a pint in August 2000
» £3 a pint in January 2011
» £4 a pint in March 2022
» £5 a pint in April 2025, probably
Roughly speaking an extra pound every 11 years.
But that last pound took just three years, so beer inflation's certainly ramping up.
Obviously other factors play an important part like energy prices, taxation and staff costs.
But it is increasingly hard to justify a long evening in a London pub.
Just don't stop, else there'll be fewer and fewer of them left.
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