Beer prices rocket as pubs charge drinkers more than £7 for a pint

Time to drown your sorrows, if you can afford it. The £7 pint may be heading to a pub near you.

Beer drinkers are already bitter by pub pint prices which are rocketing by up to 50p in the past month alone. But there may be worse to come.

This is the largest rise in five years and bosses blame it on a 30-year inflation high, soaring energy and transport cost and higher wages.

Some fear it will be another nail in the coffin for Britain’s pubs which were aleing even before the lockdown.

Today Heathrow’s Big Smoke Taphouse and Kitchen was selling Medicine Man IPA for the equivalent of £8.30 a pint. Amstel lager at Manchester airport was £7. In South London, a pint of Neck Oil IPA at Borough Market’s Bunch of Grapes pub costs £6.65.

While the Dion Bar, near St Paul’s Cathedral, charged £6.50 for a pint of Gamma Ray.

Campaign for Pubs pressure group boss Greg Mulholland said the “extraordinary” prices could put off beer fans from going to the pub.

He said publicans will not be making any money because “the energy bills for pubs, for which there is no support and no restriction, are terrifying.

Large pub companies have put their own prices up for tenants. I have seen cases of 30p, 40p or 50p more for a pint.”

On average, a pint in the UK is £4.07 and £4.84 in the capital. But London’s Time Out listing magazine warned the “seven-pounder is starting to pop up.”

And the Campaign for Real Ale fears the national average will soon be £5.

Drink bosses say returning VAT to pre pandemic levels of 20% may be fatal for many businesses.

Emma McClarkin, of the British Beer and Pub Association, said: “Pubs are having to find ways to ensure their viability and keep their doors open, because the cost of doing business in 2022 is fundamentally different to 2019.”

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