Be Excellent To Each Other

Went out last night for beers with some friends

We were in Wokingham, which is a nice small town in Berkshire.

I met my friends and we had 3 beers then moved on to another place by which time it was my round.

So I order 2 pints of San Miguel and 1 pint of Tiger..........£14!!

Clearly I don't get out enough! Even at 9.45pm when we went to an Indian for some food the pubs were very quiet, not surprising if larger is costing £4.50 or more pint.

Had a great night and we are going to do this every few months now, so beer prices won't put me off just shocked how expensive a pint is these days

£4.50?

Bargain!

£2.50 - £3.50 around here. Depends what you're drinking

Weatherspoons are the cheapest pubs but only really go there for brekkies rather than a drink as they're pretty soulless.

A beer is $0.50 or $1 here. A little glass that is about half a pint I think.

I don't drink beer, typically a 330ml cider is like $2.50, either a Bruntys or a Magners, or spirit + mixer for $2.

There are a lot of retired alcoholics around.

Edit: Alcoholics who are retired, not people who have retired from alcoholism.

America...? Australia...?

Cambodia.

A premium pint like Peroni in a fairly posh pub is about £4.20 round here, and a quid less for a Stella in somewhere unremarkable. If we want cheap, we can go to the Wetherspoons.

The micropub I frequent doesn't sell lager (keeps the hoi polloi out) except Camden Brewery bottles which are about a fiver I think, the dinerpub near them is well over £4 for a pint of Coors Light lager. Bitters in The Village range from £2.70 to £3.80 but the micropub is more £3 to £3.50 a pint.

I don't drink pints. I am not phased by cocktail prices until they get above £12.

Last night was my first pub trip in a while so I was wondering what the prices would be like. Coke was £2.75 a pint. The only booze I bought was a pint of strongbow and a double JD & coke which came to £8.80. I don't mind paying that with it being occasional.

My local is £3.10 a pint for the guest ales.

Blimey! I hope they serve it ice cold!

Local pubs around £3 for a standard lager. In the city, that go up to a fiver. I think I paid £6 for a Sierra Nevada once, but that might have been a nightmare

I don't think that I've been in a pub since 2008. No idea what the prices are round here.

Typically they have thick glasses that they keep in the freezer, and it's not uncommon to drink it with ice.

Depends on the place, happy to pay £15 for one in London if its a good bar, there was a cocktail bar in one of the pubs we were in Friday night. I asked for an Old Fashioned and they had no idea what that was so I knew they would do shit cocktails.

One of my mates was insistent so ordered a vodka martini, it was £8 and shit.

Beer in Oxford is pretty much hovering at the £4 mark, unless you go to the Goats (a Sam Smith's place) or the Wetherspoons.

I recently accompanied some work colleagues to a cocktail bar during happy hour to be sociable. As I don't do cocktails or spirits, I ordered a pint of Meantime. £5.50. Ouch. Not going there again.

Who really goes to the pub regularly these days?

When I was growing up pubs were places you went to because they were better than home. There was one telly in the house that you couldn't choose what to watch on 'cause your dad had it all booked out, and there was fuck all else to do, so of course you were down the pub with your mates all the time once you could get served. (Yes you might have had a computer on a portable telly in your room or something, but there was no internet or shit like that.)

Pubs had alcohol, and pool and darts, and pinballs and video games and fruit machines and fanny - it was the obvious choice, and because loads of people liked going to the pub, they were lively places to go to.

Fast forward to today and thinking around my friends who have offspring of 'pub-going age' hardly any of them bother, and why would they? Pubs are shit, the drinks cost a fortune, and there are far more forms of entertainment at home. Why pay £1 for a game of pool on a knackered table with shit cues when you've got Battlefield 4 at home and can Snapchat pics of genitals back and forth with your girlfriend?

And amongst my peers the number of times we go to the pub per year probably doesn't even get into double figures, we'll do a session once in a while as a sort of social occasion, but the old concept of 'going out to the pub' as a standard leisure pastime is just totally gone.

The prices don't help of course, a decent lager will set you back north of £4 per pint, bitter probably about £3, and if you move onto spirits things can get very expensive, very quickly.

I don't think the pub will die out completely, but the current trend of their numbers substantially declining still has some way to run IMO.

Londoners.

Grim..., Cras, Curio, and I work within 20 minutes of each other but live at least an hour apart. It's far more practical to meet in the pub after work than it is to travel from one of our houses to another.

People with friends

Seriously though, young people nowadays simply don't drink, and it's a huge problem for pubs.

Whether that's because they're not health conscious or because they'd rather be at home I'm not sure (although we did a load of research on it so I could find out).

@ Doc and Grim...

Point taken on both counts, I suppose I'm forgetting the IOM element whereby it's essentially impossible to ever live more than an hour's drive away from anyone else

That said though, it seems to me that other venues have replaced the pub for a lot of people, Mrs Hearthly for example often chooses to meet her friends during the day for a coffee or go for a bite to eat somewhere, in preference to meeting up of an evening and going to the pub.

For younger people my take on it is that the pub is antiquated and pointless to them, they use the internet, mobile devices and social media etc to socialise with their friends. An awful lot of them have much better home circumstances than we did growing up, it's flat out a better place for them to be.

Last night we were joined by a mate's son on our GTAV session, he was at home, Facebooking/Snapchatting/etc his girlfriend and playing GTAV with us at the same time - why the fuck is he going to trudge down the road to a pub for a massively expensive pint of lager when he can drink whatever he wants for a fraction of the cost at home, and enjoy all his favourite leisure activities at the same time?

For people in their late teens and twenties now, the pub simply isn't a cultural thing for most of them, I honestly don't think it even occurs to them that going to the pub would be something they want to do, there's just no compelling reason to go there.

Kids in their 20s and early thirties were the first to grow up in an era of properly family friendly pubs. Focus on food and wacky warehouses and what not. When I grew up the sole nod to kids in pubs was a rusting climbing frame and swing on the mud patch with grass that was referred to as a beer garden.

Accordingly when we we're 16 the pub and the allure of the secret mysterious place where we didn't know what treats and deviances laid within and so we were in a rush to try it to excess.

Basically, pubs used to be like vaginas. Now they're not.

Kids in their 20s and early thirties were the first to grow up in an era of properly family friendly pubs. Focus on food and wacky warehouses and what not. When I grew up the sole nod to kids in pubs was a rusting climbing frame and swing on the mud patch with grass that was referred to as a beer garden.

Accordingly when we we're 16 the pub and the allure of the secret mysterious place where we didn't know what treats and deviances laid within and so we were in a rush to try it to excess.

Basically, pubs used to be like vaginas. Now they're not.

To go to the pub is a social thing, to spend time with friends. rather than just messaging.

Why have restaurants either, when i can cook at home?

Quite - that's happening too.

Not as badly, as cooking takes skill and effort (compared to opening a can) but less people are going to restaurants.

I think I keep my local take aways in business..

Yo!

Netrunner club is in the pub. I don't think I'd have those people round my manor.

Micropub is halfway between The Park in The Village and home so a good stopping off point . They also have an ever changing line up of beers, and the brewers from 2 different places drink there. It is a source of information for me. Although Neighbour works there now so it is one fewer places i can take my girlfriend.

My mates and I go to pubs to not be at home where we can talk away from The Women and try more beers.

I don't have Sky Sports so if I wish to watvh footyball I go to Ringo Bell's place. Ringo Bells is pretty good to watch Proper Rugby in.

So: Range of beer and netrunner I suppose for me.

Also Barmaids

Now everyone knows that if you're going to run a successful café, you have to hire the prettiest waitress. And it boils down to this very simple doctrine, givven by Ralph Habbasham the owner:
Ralph says the customer is always right, andd the customers here are mostly men, and though it don't seem, from table 2 to 16, all men do is dream of falling in love, just like women.

My nephew is 15, I was telling him how my Friday night at his age consisted of drinking cans and smoking with my mates in the park. He pretty much echoed what you are saying but also said most of his peers don't get pissed as they fear making fools of themselves on social media.

Unlike the cider induced stupidity of my youth which is just a hazy memory social media never goes away!

Even with the prices I will be making the effort to go once every two months as I don't see people otherwise.

Even the ones that do don't spend in pubs. The postroom guys at work are all in their 20's and told me they get tanked up at home on supermarket booze before they go out around 10pm. Then they mostly drink water in clubs until the early hours.



For us its almost 2 ends of the spectrum for eating out these days.

If its the wife and I then I will be very choosy as I cook at home and I know the prices of meat and fish, I have to really push myself to go out as I can do as well as most places locally myself for a lot less money.

I get that there is a huge different cooking for 2 and running a restaurant though.

With my son its more about what he will eat and the best chain place we can find, so usually its Wagamama as that's quite good and the food is fresh in most dishes. Sometime we do Pizza Express as that ends up costing next to nothing with a few Tesco Vouchers @4-1 face value.

Bloody hell.

That's the best part of a good night

I don't drink pints but a vodka (or vodka and lemonade if I'm feeling wussy) will be anything from £2 to £8 locally. Decent cocktails circa £6 - £8 but lots do happy hour where it's two for one (and then I just order the whole menu).

As a young(ish) person I do like going to pub/socialising but probably drink way more at home just because I don't have to find a babysitter to do that!

I can relate to a lot of that, despite not being in my early 20s, or quite as old as some as you lot.

When I was A-levels age, I rarely went to pubs, as I couldn't see the point and din't enjoy it. Spending money to spend time in a dark, loud place filled with carcinogenic fumes and aggressive randoms… No thanks. My main friends could afford to go regularly, as unlike me they didn't enter further education and had jobs or were on the dole but living with parents, but I couldn't spend income that I didn't have. (I wanted to save what money I had for going to university as well.) And to be honest, I didn't like how my friends acted in pubs, they were the violent sort so that wasn't an issue, but went all introverted and quiet and miserable whenever they consumed alcohol in the pubs. At home, in a well-lit atmosphere where we could hear each other, and perhaps play a few games, it was OK. Even quite good fun. But not in pubs.

Wasn't there a stat banded about a few years ago that said pubs were closing at the rate of 2 a day or something like that?

Surely they should all be shut by now?

No, a few are being opened. Weatherspoons open a few a month

They tend to open town centre places at lot still, so I guess with the size of the company and the fact they are know for cheap booze they still work out.

The pub down the bottom of the road has been closed for 18 months now, the 3 years before that it has a couple of "under new management" signs on it when new people took it on. At the same time there was always a huge sign telling you who to call if you wanted a go a leasing the place, like they knew it was doomed to fail!

A beer here is anywhere between 6 and 10quid. A session at the pub can get very expensive.

To be fair, fermented herring juice is very difficult to make.

Wetherspoons have our are trying to sell in the region of 80 pubs in the past year. 50 in the past 3 months or so.

£3 a pint is an "unaffordable luxury".

It was £4 a pint in Leeds on Tuesday for a pint of localish 5.5% pale ale

Not sure that would describe very many pubs that I've drunk in!

I'm always in a pub, whether with mates of by myself. It's just social. I get to know the staff, regulars, and usually mates will turn up at some point without the need for organising an event or whatnot. But maybe I'm just strange like that.

London pub prices are fucking stupid, but you need to also read the environment. There's a proper pub near me that does local ciders for £2-3 a half (at 7%, sometimes a half is just fine) and nearly always has a dog in the beer garden, but there's also a hipster pub in Shoreditch that will charge you £17 for a vodka and Diet Coke whilst some DJ prat tries to awkwardly mix a bunch of jazz vinyls together.

Just one?

One of several There's also a few good boozers in Shoreditch I don't mind going to on the reg. I even got told to move out of the way by Danny Dyer in one.

Did he call you a FACKING CAHNT while doing so?

Just got home from a session in the same place that started this post

No difference in beer prices....... but the first pub we always start in had Red Stripe on tap, which is according to the bar person is a relaunch.

It was so good that for the first time in 5 years we stayed in the one pub and did the 6 pints before food standard allowance.

Now for 5 hours sleep before child comes looking for me

Spoons was knocking delicious Devils Backbone out at 1.99 a pint on Tuesday, getting rid of draught in favour of bottles.

So the enormous losses due to Wells and Young being unable to brew it properly (easily 20% loss on super-carbonation) are now at my expense not theirs. Boo!

So... Are we doing prices? Tonight in London it was £4.50 for a pint of Carlsberg.

The Moretti was £5