What would you do to help the pub industry?

bladdered said:
I'm sure the pub snob group will hate this but simply follow the Wetherspoons model.

Provide reasonable prices for beer and grub and the punters will come.

My local charges £1.99 for Abbot Ale - £1.79 Mon-Wed. Cheaper than Tesco!

It's always got a good crowd in whilst the craft beer pubs around here charging a fiver a pint are dead.

It's not rocket science.
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You're kind of right, this only works if you are a freehouse, or even better a free hold, the problem is most are tied to breweries who control the price. Only 50% of pubs are free houses.

Forcing the corporate owners when they shut them, if they are not sold within 6 months, to sell to local resident groups at a market price for the building alone and not as a business might help. If more of the pubs were owned and run by communities it might help a bit with social cohesion. The government would need to prevent the pub chains imposing restrictive covenants on reopening as a pub following its sale, which they do to limit local competition.

You obviously have to play to your local market so the Spoons model might not be appropriate everywhere, but providing value for money whether thats at the more upmarket end or the lower end remains key. So no charging top notch prices for food I could make at home for a few quid.
 
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Grassland Blue said:
My plan would be to tax the beer which is sold in supermarkets more highly than that sold in pubs. I would hope that that such a measure would discourage the drink at home brigade in favour of those going out for a pint or three.
Thoughts?
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What next, heavily tax chocolate bars in supermarkets to make them the same price as in a cinema?
Or steak to make it the same price as a restaurant!

Why is beer so much cheaper in a Spoons?
 
Obviously lots of pubs have closed over the years, but unless you live in the middle of nowhere, you still have a huge choice.

We've lost about one third of pubs in the last fifty years, so nobody here is likely to be struggling to find somewhere to drink in their lifetime.

Society has changed hugely since the 70s, and this is just a part of that change. There are no doubt arguments about landlords making money, as opposed to the multinationals, but I don't see any huge need to make the overall industry more profitable, or increase the number of pubs.
 
halfmist said:
Why should I pay more to subsidise the great unwashed who clog the bar up when I am trying to get served.
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It’s a good point to be fair….maybe different serving points for scalls and doleys??…but you’ll probably get push back for discrimination from some quarters of the media…
 
Years ago going to the pub was better than being at home. It was warmer, the tele at home was shit and you couldn’t buy good beer in bottles or cans. Now your average house is better than the pub, warm, 100s of TV/film/sport channels and the same beer but 1/4 of the price from the supermarket. People used to go out nearly every night for one or two, now it’s often a special occasion. Young people don’t seem to drink as much either. I think taxing beer not sold in pubs and reducing the tax on alcohol in pubs to zero would help.
 
Grassland Blue said:
My plan would be to tax the beer which is sold in supermarkets more highly than that sold in pubs. I would hope that that such a measure would discourage the drink at home brigade in favour of those going out for a pint or three.
Thoughts?
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whilst I agree in principle I think forcing people to drink in pubs that they do not want to go to will kill both pubs and the drinks industry. Also you overlook wines and spirits. Increase them as well? You'd have to hugely increase Police numbers to check on after hours lockins and police an inevitable rise in drink driving. I am afraid as ever a problem years in the making cannot be solved by a simple idea. I am sure this will have come up time and time again over the last 20 years.
 
bavarian blue said:
I have always been a social drinker, not interested in 6 packs of lager from Tesco.
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Exactly. And this is the main issue with the loss of the pub. It’s not just pubs, it’s any third places where people socialise. Even with the death of things like churches, which I’m no fan of generally. But yeah, I don’t really keep alcohol in the house because I don’t see the point of drinking it by myself. But equally, I get the impression that just going round to people’s house for a visit has dropped off a bit too. I remember constantly being dragged around to friends of my mum or grandma when I was a kid, or people coming round ours and the plate of biscuits and the teapot coming out. I don’t see that so much any more, except for family that want their kids looking after.
 
My Local (which is also a Hotel) in Sale charges the grand total of £6.40 for a Guinness, for comparison the Devonshire in the centre of Soho in that there London charges £6.70.

My other Local, attached to a Tram stop charges £6.10. The connection? Both JW Lees pubs.

I believe there has been a conspiracy over a few years now to load up the prices of beer, especially in the North so that we are paying vast amounts to sit with a Pint in a pub. If the prices, especially those non city centre boozers were more reasonable, more people would go out for longer.
 
dickie davies said:
We're having our own beer festival at home on Saturday where everyone eryone has been tasked with buying six beers or ciders
and the bbq will be lit up at least twice

My selection

View attachment 166864
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Pretentious tw*t lol - where's the can of John Smiths?

Can I recommend anything by Shindigger, especially the Mango or Session IPAs - top drop
 
Northerndave said:
Pretentious tw*t lol - where's the can of John Smiths?

Can I recommend anything by Shindigger, especially the Mango or Session IPAs - top drop
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It's amazing how my taste for beer has changed over the years
I was a lager drinker that moved onto bitter, but now it's IPA's as i find there's much more flavour in these
I was away earlier this week and had a pint of Theakston's bitter in the hotel bar with my meal and I thought it was pretty tasteless
 
A chain of nationalised and subsidized pubs. Stop weird "local noise complaints" from fuckwits who buy or rent above or close to a well established pub.
 
dickie davies said:
It's amazing how my taste for beer has changed over the years
I was a lager drinker that moved onto bitter, but now it's IPA's as i find there's much more flavour in these
I was away earlier this week and had a pint of Theakston's bitter in the hotel bar with my meal and I thought it was pretty tasteless
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When IPA first came back into fashion I hated it. Everything was sour and over-hopped and just left a real bitter taste on the palate. Over the years it's now mutated so that a lot of it just like a really tasty lager, refreshing with enhanced flavours.

If you'd asked me a few years ago, I'd drink Guinness most of the year and when boiling hot, Lager (started on Bitter when much younger). Now, like you, I find myself ordering IPAs on a regular basis.
 
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