Mine wasn’t, but in practice, I fall that way because money is tight. So I drink much less than I would otherwise. I like to hit my local brewpub weekly for 2-3 glasses (probably works out to three times a month rather than weekly) for conversation to go with good beer, which means I don’t buy that $10 sixpack for home consumption that often. These days, I don’t buy any price sixpack for home consumption, figuring that $15 or so/week on drinking is enough.

I mean, I sure do understand that it’s only a buck or two more a sixer, but that $50-100 over a year can mean something. And for folks who’d drink more than a sixer a week, it can mean a lot more.

This doesn’t fault brewers at all. The beer is certainly worth $10 a sixpack to me, if I had the money or made different choices. But beer is a (take your pick) luxury/entertainment choice/something that’s not food or medicine or a roof over my head.

And i think that psychologically, when money is tight for anybody, be they craft beer lovers or the wider Chicago Tribune audience, even when you show that the monetary difference isn’t that great between beer X and Y, nevertheless there’s resistance and/or discomfort in paying/justifying the higher price. Or if one’s price point has long been X, disbelief that a beer that costs X + Y can be that much better.

This just in: local good beer store in Chicago’s N. ‘burbs; Goose Island, all labels, now (as of this week) at $8.50. Sheesh.

S.

There’s a lot to tease apart in the price of a beer. Let’s consider cost. No doubt few of the readers know that the price of barley and hops went up in the past year, raising the price of regular six packs. Specialty beers might have been aged months or even years. I read yesterday about a Scottish brewery that is shipping its IPA to India as an experiment of historic shipped beer. The experiment will be underwritten by the people willing to spend lots of money on a bottle. So costs matter.

But then there’s this: what’s “too much?” How much did we pay for a sixer of beer at the start of the micro revolution? If you take your nine 2009 bucks back to 1990, they shrink to $5.54. Is that a whole lot more than we were paying back in ’90? My guess is no. So part of the reason prices seem so high is because they were artificially low for a number of years. Take seven 2005 dollars–probably a decent average for the price of beer then–back to 1990 and it’s just $4.68. I definitely know we weren’t buying beer for less than five bucks a sixer then.

There’s a lot of class commentary in the comments here and on the Trib thread. I’m wondering how much this is a function of real price inflation and how much it is a sign of the economic times.

Wort, I love the irony in your comment. You write a blog. You are a part of the fanatacism. Sure, you might not back it with your wallet, but you’re feeding that portion of society that is thirsty for beer.

If the beer is better than most you can find out there, is it worth a little more? I had the opportunity to sample some of the Metropolitan beers a few weeks ago, pretty good brews. OTOH, I probably won’t be dropping $9 for a sixer anytime soon with so many equally good beers at lesser prices.

That being said, some of the most expensive beer (not the best – trying to be objective here) can be purchased for $20-30 dollars a bottle. Compare that to wines, whiskeys, and whatever other craft fermented beverage that regularly exceed $100 per bottle. I will willingly plunk down $25 per bottle for a great beer because it will beat the pants off of most $25 bottle wines in the market. Price per value beer has the market beat hands down.