How much does a pint of lager cost? An Alphaville investigation

Receive free Office for National Statistics UK updates

We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest Office for National Statistics UK news every morning.

Here is some really good tweeting:

This pattern is the same whether we look at ‘standard’ or ‘premium’ lagers.

What’s this about?

Greater diversity in the market (either of products or of pubs/bars)? Bigger regional variation in prices? Something else? pic.twitter.com/p36M0GuHOh

— Colin Angus (@VictimOfMaths) July 17, 2023

Jokes about £10 pints are more common than £10 pints themselves (we’re not Norway), but there’s little question — no doubt something to do with the distinct pain of buying a round — that pint-sized price inflation a particular place in the British psyche.

So let’s gaze into our glasses and continue a rich tradition of pub-focused FTAV journalism. First things first: here’s how the average price of a pint of lager or bitter has changed over the years:

You are seeing a snapshot of an interactive graphic. This is most likely due to being offline or JavaScript being disabled in your browser.

Facts:

— If you remember buying <£1 pints and you respect the legal drinking laws of the United Kingdom, then you’re at least 50ish years old.
— For all the £10 pint paranoia, £5 is actually the more significant looming milestone.

Now, the spreads. We’re not going to waste our time or yours by recreating the charts above, but here’s the spread of draught lager pint prices in May 2023 versus those in May 2010 (when a shiny-faced ingenu called David Cameron had just become prime minister):

You are seeing a snapshot of an interactive graphic. This is most likely due to being offline or JavaScript being disabled in your browser.

First impressions:

— If you tilt your head to the right, this looks like an elf stood next to a keg. That’s called technical analysis.

Further impressions:

— Perhaps the wider spread is just a natural follow-on of price inflation. Sure, things haven’t moved much at the bottom, but the given the average has moved higher, a wider nominal spread around it makes sense (more on this later). If we were to compare 2000 to 2010, would 2010 be the elf on the pogo stick? The answer: we don’t know, because the ONS doesn’t disclose specific prices pre-2010.

Further further impressions:

— The ONS seems to sample a lot of prices for pints, at least relative to olive oil.

Rather than throwing around vague allegations that the agents employed Britain’s national statistics provider are just keen to go to the pub, we wanted to quantify that final point. Here — created after extensive consultation with the FT’s award-winning data team — are all the items the ONS sampled prices for last month, ordered by the number of prices gathered:

You are seeing a snapshot of an interactive graphic. This is most likely due to being offline or JavaScript being disabled in your browser.

If your computer is still running after viewing that chart, congrats. We’ll just note that the only kind of pint at the lower end of things is a two-pint bottle of milk. ????☕️

What were we talking about? Oh yeah, pint spreads. Um, is a regional view interesting?

You are seeing a snapshot of an interactive graphic. This is most likely due to being offline or JavaScript being disabled in your browser.

Yikes. Err…

— You can click the legend at the top to exclude either series, which might help anyone now having Yayoi Kusama flashbacks.
— London has the most expensive cheapest pint, but both the joint-cheapest cheapest AND the most expensive expensive bitter.
— Someone in East Anglia is having a laugh charging £6.50 for a pint of lager. We note without prejudice that there are BrewDog pubs in both Cambridge and Norwich.
— What is going on in Northern Ireland? Is it actually not possible to find a pint for less than £4 there?

In an effort to clarify things a bit, here are the pure spreads at May 2023 prices:

You are seeing a snapshot of an interactive graphic. This is most likely due to being offline or JavaScript being disabled in your browser.

Umm:

— London has the biggest spread for bitter prices, while East Anglia has the biggest for lager (again, poke/click the legend to see the difference excluding either drink category one makes).
— Northern Ireland has tight spreads, likely a corollary of its weirdly-high base prices.

It feels like we’ve got sidetracked slightly, but we’re getting there — sorry, it’s supposed to be compared with 2010. Mixing drinks is causing issues here, so let’s try just lager. Beeswarm:

You are seeing a snapshot of an interactive graphic. This is most likely due to being offline or JavaScript being disabled in your browser.

Let’s move swiftly on to those spreads. Comparing 2010 and 2023 spreads at the same time:

You are seeing a snapshot of an interactive graphic. This is most likely due to being offline or JavaScript being disabled in your browser.

Just kinda vibing this out:

— East Anglia was loose then and it’s loose now
— Wales has gone from ultra-tight to moderately loose
— Northern Ireland has gone from moderately tight to very tight
— Nowhere was tight and is now super loose
— The generally rightwards angling of the middle lot means, statistically, that 2010 spread looseness has generally led to average 2023 looseness
— Help they’re forcing me to file more copy

What have we learned so far? After extensive regional analysis: absolutely nothing.

Does the ONS track anything else useful about these prices? Well, there’s shop_type, a field with two values:

— 1 is “multiple”, referring to businesses with 10 or more outlets
— 2 is “independent”, referring to those with fewer than 10 outlets

Once more unto the breach…

You are seeing a snapshot of an interactive graphic. This is most likely due to being offline or JavaScript being disabled in your browser.

Independents are broadly more expensive than chains, whoddathunkkit?

OK this really isn’t getting anywhere are we’ve genuinely grateful you’ve read this far. Maybe our approach has been wrong from the start. Should we check whether the overall effect is visible in other areas that aren’t just pints (of beer)? Here’s two-pint bottles of semi-skimmed milk:

You are seeing a snapshot of an interactive graphic. This is most likely due to being offline or JavaScript being disabled in your browser.

The broad impression is similar, although It’s interesting to see how concentrated at certain price points milk is — we’d hazard a guess that it’s one of the price points shoppers really recognise (or perhaps has been drilled into their brains by the parlous state of political discourse).

Furthering the “it’s just how inflation works” theory, here’s how those spreads look with the prices viewed as a percentage of that month’s average:

You are seeing a snapshot of an interactive graphic. This is most likely due to being offline or JavaScript being disabled in your browser.

OK, the spread is still wider, but it’s looking a lot more like we’re hitting something that kinda makes sense here. Let’s try some beer:

You are seeing a snapshot of an interactive graphic. This is most likely due to being offline or JavaScript being disabled in your browser.

Initially this may look like a repeat of the classic elf/keg formation, but we’d once again encourage you to click on the legend. Do so, and you will discover:

— bitters in 2023 are in short, skinny elf style (the ’Dobby’), paired elevated keg structure in 2010:

— lagers in 2023 are in a shorter, rounded elf style (known as a ‘Lapland’ formation), paired with a dreidel keg pattern from 2010:

In practical terms (ie the extent to which one is likely to say “Jesus that’s an expensive pint”/“wow that’s such a cheap pint, maybe I’ll actually buy a round”) this means that the lager spread has remained pretty consistent, whereas bitters are far more volatile. It also means the vast majority of analysis conducted in this article was a waste of our time and yours.

So, uh, yeah.

Further reading
— Here’s what we learned from ordering 213 curries at Wetherspoons