Be Excellent To Each Other

As my wife is expecting soon, we signed up on the NCT (National Childbirth Trust) course. In addition to teaching you about you baby etc there is a strong social element to the course and the idea is that the women have friends that they can call on for support once the course is finished.

As such there has been a fair amount of socialising, it tends to be ladies having baby showers and the men at the pub . The first few times its always been rounds so I never noticed the cost of a pint, the other night I got there first so ordered a pint of San Miguel, it was £3.85! This was in a back water pub as well.

By contrast in Tesco you can get just under 7 pints for £10.

I was shocked to see how expensive pub drinking has become, I don’t know how people afford it, do many people here hit the pubs regularly?

I've preferred to get my drinks from the supermarket for over a decade, but if you do go to the pub and cost is an issue then a wetherspoons is always going to be cheap.

When I've been recently I've always found the ales to be cheaper comparatively. And nicer.

I got to pubs in London, and paying £silly for a pint is something you get used to. £3.85 sounds quite good

When I go out in Bedford, though, I'm always shocked at how cheap it is.

A bar bill in London is a ton, every time. And that's without going to expensive places.

£100 every time you go out? Are you drinking a lot, or one bottle of tattinger?

A moderately priced place in London owuld be around £5-6 a pint. A spenny place might be £8. You're not drinking 12-20 pints a night, are you?

Who's counting?

A couple of rounds for ten people sorts that out fast, though.

MrsA and I spent about £70 on drinks in Leeds on Monday, and that wasn't particularly trying. If I see my friend in Otley for a few beers, I'll go through £40 easily, more people and longer time out that escalates, quickly.Decent booze is by no means cheap, but worth it :burp:

£3.85 sounds about right for that kind of lager in Oxford. I generally pay around £3.40 for a pint of ale/bitter/etc.
Oxford - like living in London, but smaller. And without a Tube.

Yes. The quiz bar is particularly spendy. Especially if buying rounds of Jägerbombs.

As an aside, my NCT group was ace. The kids all recently celebrated their second birthdays, and we still see the other parents regularly. Makes for helpful new circle of friends (though one couple in our group was one of my best friends already!)

My NCT group was tiresome. Largely because it was dominated by one angry american who didn't talk often, but when he did, it was like dropping a bomb on every conversation. In sessions, as well as the pub. Shame, because most of the rest of us had a laugh and happily took the piss, but as a result the pub drinks soon dried up. And then we all moved away anyway.

Jerusalem isn't really an expensive bar. Given location I think it's quite cheap for London, although their shots are a bit expensive. One month they doubled in price!

Yeah, it's not that bad per drink. You just end up having a lot of drinks.

Yes, this. but that is no bad thing.

I'm pretty sure it was about 13 quid for a double JD/coke and a pint last time.

Up here (passim), I'll raise my eyebrows if bitter from the pump is above £3 a pint. What annoys m,e is irritating pricing structures, such as £2.75 a pint, so 4 pints is then £11 and you end up with 5p pieces. I'll pop in to the pub clsioest to me about twice a week and have a pint or two after work for a quick flick through the paper and hope to get back before MrsA returns home (I get home about ten past four, she gets home between half five and seven, but that's another moan for another day) and maybe on a Sunday if I want to watch any football. Then I'll have three pints.

Your problem here was ordering a pint of JD and coke and a double beer.

Anyway - JD should come in about £3.50/ea and the pint at £4. I think jerusalem have 35ml measures, so a double is, in fact, a triple.

See, your problem there is that you only bought two drinks. And also that clearly neither of them was for me.

Unless it’s a specific event then I don’t see much value in the pub, if I went with my wife for 5 drinks then there would be very little left from £50. That’s if you can find a pub that’s not full of wankers (an issue local to me rather than all pubs)

For £50 you can each a steak each and even get a bottle of champagne if they are the right price at the supermarket.

The problem is that one of them wasn't beer.

Surely the problem here is you're even expecting some kind of value for money comparison at all? Eating/drinking out isn't intended to be cheaper than staying at home and never will be so it's a pointless aspect to compare. You might as well complain that your house doesn't have wheels on it so isn't as good as a caravan.

I frequently find that going out for dinner can be cheaper than staying in after the cost of the tesco trip. It seems to be impossible to spend less than £30 at a time, even if i'm buying just one meal.
I'm pretty much the definition of an impulse buyer.

Man I hate it. Every house round here has wheels... and well yeah

I once paid £9.45 for a pint of Coke and a pint of Guinness at a pub/restaurant just on the outskirts of Shrewsbury.

Surprisingly, that place is now in administration. How the hell they've managed that with profit margins that extreme, I don't know.

I once paid €40 for 2 x 330ml beers in Paris. Stupid sitting at the pavement edge and not realising that the waiters charge you by the metre.

It's just over £3 for a pint of Stella in the local pub we sometimes wander to which isn't *too* bad.

The trouble is that I used to go out to the (cheap) pubs a few times a week with friends and then pretty much stopped for five or six years, so in my mind beer has jumped in price by 50% from about £2 a pint (more like £2.40 but I round that down) in no time at all.

I still feel justified in wincing at £4.30 for a pint of Peroni in a nice country pub, and as for London prices.....

£2 a pint night is very popular around here.

I remember going to a "double vodka + red bull for a pound!" night as a student. The pavement outside looked like that panning shot of the wounded from Gone With the Wind. Drunken students vomiting and laying face down in their own piss as far as the eye could see.

I remember at uni during the rugby world cup certain beers were £1 a pint!

Malc

For many years, the bar at the Oxford Union claimed to be the last place in the city serving a beer at £1 a pint. What you got for your coin was little more than murky-coloured water.

At £2 a pint of 5% beer, the tax would be 55p Excise and 33p VAT. That doesn't leave much for the bar!

I remember going clubbing in my Uni days. Bottles of Carling were 40p, and if you really wanted to roll the boat out and have Hooch or Heineken, it was 60p.

Comparing pub drinks with home drinks is the drinking equivalent of Consoles VS PC, or KBAM VS Joypad.

Drinking at home is cheaper, faster, more efficient, greater variety, and with better graphics (taste) and less DRM (no drinking up time).

But despite all that, going out is still loads and loads better. Obviously.

PCs have less DRM?

Ah I dunno, insert whatever silly PC people boast about. C

The best I had at uni was a place that did 50p vodka and mixers. And they had Irn-Bru on tap!!!

Heh. The above was at 5th Av. We should go there and be dicks.

I used to go out with a groat and drink half flagons of mead all night.

And still have change for a rat on a stick in the plague cart home.

You were lucky!