- a £100 jacket will be twice as good as a £50 jackets
- a £200 jacket will be better, but not twice as good as a £100 jacket
- a £400 jacket* may be better than a £200 jacket but the improvements are getting marginal
This advice keeps coming to mind when I see overpriced** beer on sale in specialist beer bars and shops.
I'm happy to pay for the extra money it costs me to get bottled not canned beer in the supermarkets because it's better. And I'm happy to pay the extra money that a pint of cask beer will cost me in a pub compared to bottled beer at home because I enjoy it more. I'll even fork out more for rare or interesting beers on occasion, though this can be a bit hit and miss.
But when I get on to beers at £8 or more a bottle or pint I really think I'm getting in to the realm of diminishing returns. In fact as beer at these prices are often very strong, imported or experimental it may even be a case that I'd be paying more for a beer I'd enjoy less.
Am I being a tight git that's missing out or are some people paying silly money for beer?
* Yes, such things exist.
** It's my blog and overpriced is the right term if you ask me.
With expensive beer you are paying for rarity. If you find that in and of itself enjoyable beyond intrinsic features like smell and taste then I suspect you would be getting your money’s worth.
ReplyDeleteBeer like most things has a wide range of qualities & prices. The products you choose depend on your personal tastes & means.
Cooking Lager: People with the means to pay for rarity can of course do that but is it worth it or are you being a mug if you do?
DeleteYou know what I would say, mug. However there are 2 forms of rarity, genuine or artificial. A bottle of beer recovered from the HMS Titanic that is still drinkable has genuine rarity value. It may be dull beer but for a hefty price you can say you took a swig. A one off cask or keg or set of bottles produced with the intention of being rare and sold at hefty price tags is a company creating artificial rarity from which it hopes to profit.
DeleteYou might pay £4 a half for a beer you'd never tried before and had heard a lot about, and wanted to know what everyone was going on about. In which case you're investing in your own knowledge/experience rather than simply paying £4 for the beer itself.
ReplyDeleteBut you're unlikely to do it more than once, hence the limited demand for these super expensive beers.
Its also the comparison factor, I'll often spend £10+ on a bottle of wine in a restaurant, yet I would never do that for a bottle of beer, even though I almost exclusively prefer beer to wine. Why?
It is an interesting point about what we're prepared to pay for wine or beer but I don't pay for wine in restaurants anyway.
DeleteHere's a thing we wrote on what gives beer value.
ReplyDeleteI think you're probably right, on the whole, that *really* expensive beers are gimmicky, and we don't tend to bother with them, though others might find the gimmick amusing/entertaining, in which case it's money well spent. (Like a ride on a rollercoaster, or ten minutes feeding pound coins into a fruit machine.)
The one that I really regret spending money on was a bottle of Deus champagne beer: really mediocre. Got seduced by the packaging and the novelty.
There definitely is something that can make beer worthwhile beyond the intrinsic smell and taste but I suppose I'm pondering how prices match up with non-intrinsic value.
DeleteAnd thanks for that on the Deus, I have been tempted to try that one, I'll save my money now.
Well, I say mediocre... we enjoyed it well enough. We'd have probably raved about it if it'd cost a fiver as opposed to... what was it? £18? And that were in *real* money.
DeleteNever tried Deus, was tempted to buy it in the presentation pack with the free glasses last Christmas though..
ReplyDeleteI don't think you are missing out, if you are enjoying what you are drinking then what's the issue. My only problem is when people are being taught that to enjoy something then it must be the most expensive you can afford or buy. Same with beer or wine IMO, there are cheaper wines which I really enjoy and expensive ones which are drain cleaners and the same applies for beer.
If I spot an unusual beer I may or may not try it, depending on what else is available, a rare beer for me is seeing Black Cat on cask or Morocco, they aren't expensive beers but I see them so rarely that I would be more than happy to just drink them in a pub and ignore uber bottled rare thing.
I always just look at the cask beers in pubs/bars too :-)
DeleteRarity and PR pump are not flavours. Too many interesting flavours at market rates to bother with premium price for the right to drink something others can't due to limited supply and jacked up price.
ReplyDeleteBTW, a bottle of beer represents at least 5 measures of drink. A bottle of beer one or maybe two.
I guess that's how I feel. Why pay silly money when there's decent beer at decent prices?
DeleteWith beer in general, there isn't really any remotely reliable trade-off between price and quality. Especially with cask beer, the main determinant of how much you pay for your pint is which pub you're in, not how good the beer is. Few if any beers can reliably achieve a price premium over others of similar strength.
ReplyDeleteThe vast majority of the time, if you are paying a big price premium, it's for rarity, not for quality.
With beer though (as with most drinks) quality is 10% objective (is it correctly served?) and 90% subjective (do I like it?). Hence its a very nebulous concept, something I might be more than willing to pay £3.80 a pint for and think good value, someone else might think a complete waste of money.
ReplyDeleteIn wine it is generally accepted that, broadly speaking, a £10 bottle will be better than a £5 bottle (although probably not twice as good) and a £20 bottle better than a £10 one. The same with whisky. There isn't remotely the same kind of consensus or structure in beer.
ReplyDeleteAnd in most pubs the beer commanding the biggest premium is Draught Guinness.
Its also muddied by the fact that the price tags of both wine and whisky tend to be uncoupled from their ABVs. Wine tends to be around 14%, whisky around 40% with very little in the way of variation. Whereas in beer, there is a wide range of ABVs and a clear sliding scale from the cheaper 3.5% beers up to the more expensive 10% types. You don't only pay extra for quality and rarity, but also for alcohol content.
ReplyDelete(Interestingly, a bottle of Westvleteren 12 costs £80 in one of my local pubs, you'd struggle to find a wine that costs that outside of London)
There is some link between beer ABV and price for bottled beer but less so for draught. And certainly with draught beer price doesn't seem to be related to quality at all. I guess we're back to why pay for rare beers when there are more common beers that taste just as good?
ReplyDeleteMost multi-beer pubs in any case will tend to charge the same for all beers in a particularly strength band.
ReplyDelete