The price of a pint [WFJ #76]

£6.90 pints in Frome are wince-inducing, but there is a reliable alternative if you know where to find it

Time for a few Timmy Taylor’s down The Ship

Presented with a card machine, while paying for my first pint at the Frome Food Network social the other day (which included – though many missed it – a special invite for paid WFJ subs), an amygdala-triggering fee appears on the display: £6.90.¹

If you measure inflation by the price of a pint, then you’ll be as shocked as everyone else right now. The average cost of a pint of draught lager (now £4.57) is experiencing its biggest increase (up by 50p from this time last year) in decades. Probably, even, since these things were recorded. 

If you measure inflation by the price of a pint, you could pick a worse barometer. Unless, that is, you’re drinking cask beer, which always seems the cheapest option at the bar, no matter what recession you’re in. If there ever was an inflation-resilient beer to drink, cask ale would probably be it.  

This is a conversation close to my heart – growing up in the South East, I was weaned on Harvey’s Sussex Best Bitter, which does provide, fortunately, an excellent pint of cask if the pub knows how to look after it. But this isn’t just about me – whether you like it or not, cask beer is part of the national psyche, almost to the point of being mythical.