I was at my local store and picked up a bottle of dupont saison recently. While I was there, I noticed that a few breweries had lines of similiarly sized large format bottles, but these were all barrel aged super-fancy beers. What seemed really…interesting…was the price tag. Bottles in the mid $30’s? One of my favorite things about beer is that I can get so many amazing beers for less than the price of a bottle of mediocre wine.
Is that sort of pricing normal, or that something new?
Semi-normal, though that price on a single bottle would be at the top end of the range, especially for beers that aren’t collectible or special, single-day releases. Every brewery these days seems to think it has to have a whale (highly sought after and heavily traded beer.) And they will frequently pull out all the stops on beer additions, or barreling, or both.
However, the market price sometimes doesn’t reflect how good or bad those beers end up being.
I have a ton of crappy beers that are collecting dust because I feel too bad about tossing them.
I have zero interest in those ‘hard sodas’, but in a moment of boredom I looked up Small Town to see if they were at least a legit craft brewery (they’re in bed with Pabst, but probably still pretty independent).
What caught my eye was the fact that the original runs of the Root Beer were 19.5% abv - yikes!
What surprised me wasn’t a few beers in that range, but dozens of them. There was a whole wall of $25+ beers. I don’t mind taking a risk on an unknown beer or 4/6 pack in the sub $15 range, but once th price gets high enough it’s impinging on my whiskey/scotch budget!
Yeah that is indeed a bit crazy. Where are you located?
Just outside Boston. Next time I’m there I’ll take a pic or gather more intel.
There are quite a few beers I’d like to try but refuse to spend $25+ a bottle for, absolutely.I have spent ten bucks on a 12oz bottle, and the few times I’ve done so they’ve been quite good, but I also have been burned a few times. Cost definitely does not equate to quality.
Yeah. I see that $20 22oz bottle of Delerium Tremens, and know people talk about how good it is, but that is a hard sell for me. Even if it is great, is it that much better that I wouldn’t be better off buying 5 $4 bottles of other high end stuff? Like those Lagunitas specials, those were worth the $4. I could get 5 more, and be perfectly happy there. Or just get a case of Deschutes and two of them.
Basically what I’m saying is that $4-5 is pretty close to my absolute maximum for a beer.
I can justify it for a high ABV beer – once you get past 12%, I start to think of it in the same realm as wine. Wine tends to last a couple of sittings, though, and I just don’t believe in doing that for beer.
But generally, yeah, it’s hard to justify the twelve-dollar bottle of Sins of Our Fathers when the four-dollar Ninkasi is right below it.
Well, there are people who are happy with a $10 bottle of wine and there are people for whom that $50 bottle is a must. I don’t think I have seen a beer for over $19 though.
I was really underwhelmed by it when I tried it, FWIW, but it’s not really my style of beer anyway. That does sound staggeringly expensive, even for that beer. It’s £9 for a pint on draught at the Lowlander (fancy continental beer place in Covent Garden) and you could probably knock a third off that if you bought it online.
Keep in mind this is for the 22oz bottle, but yeah. Pretty sure that’s the normal price here.
A (UK) pint is, what 5/6 of 22oz?
2/3 maybe…I thought a UK pint was around 15-16OZ plus or minus.
Isn’t a UK pint a “true” pint while we get 15oz pints for some reason, or do I have that backwards.
Yes, you can keep wine a bit easier than beer. Once you open a 22oz beer, you damn well better drink it.
lmgtfy: UK pint = 568 ml; US pint = 473 ml; 22 US oz = 650,618 ml
I don’t know if it’s me or the way you wrote that but that doesn’t make sense. A US pint is technically 16oz, so how can it be 473 ml compared to 22oz being 650,618 ml?
I have been told however that a “pint” of beer is not the same as a true measured pint. I think that is what I was referring to.
So, dating someone in the service industry, yes, 16oz is a pint here in the US. Did you know that the biggest scam though are “pint” glasses that look the same but are actually 14oz versions. Menus will not say “pint,” and you’ll never be the wiser unless you can spot the glassware.
Here is an example, but I’ve seen other glassware that is similar:
Good call. Will be on the lookout.
That is what I was referring to. Most bars and restaurants do not pour a pint into a pint glass.
This was made pretty clear to me when you start pouring a 12oz beer at home into what you assumed was a 16oz bar or restaurant glass. Something just ain’t right there.
