With the £10 pint now on the horizon, joint managing director of Robinsons Brewery Oliver Robinson is encouraging his managed pub teams to be bolder with pricing.
“We are under huge costs pressures, and it is a challenge. But we’ve got to be braver,” he said during a panel at MCA’s Pub Conference last week.
Robinson said despite adding a pound to a pint of cask beer in the last 12 months at managed pubs, the category was still performing well: “We’ve not seen any loss in sales.”
But although the brewer’s costs have gone up in excess of 25% on raw materials, he says the company has only been able to pass on about 6% to the consumer.
Meanwhile, BrewDog’s James Brown believes the craft category will be the first to hit the £10 milestone - though he said the brand is doing everything it can not to pass on costs to the consumer.
Brown explained that at the start of the year, BrewDog worked hard to re-engineer its cost base across all elements of the business.
“We knew the economic outlook this year for our consumers was going to be tough. We worked really hard not to pass on that pricing.”
The BrewDog Bars CEO said though supermarkets have a strong advantage on price, the off-trade was no substitute for a proper hospitality experience.
“You can go and buy beer cheaply from a supermarket and drink it at home, but it’s not the same experience as coming into a pub and getting a really warm welcome,” he said.
Beer somellier Annabel Smith agreed brewers were absorbing a lot of cost at the moment, highlighting cask specifically as having been under-priced for many years.
“The pricing structure has been incorrect,” she said. “We’ve seen it as a commodity and priced it in terms of ABV instead of the quality of the ingredients and the quality of the processes that are going into it”.
