Category: General

The grand pop rip off

Now, this blog was supposed to be about beer and food. This post however, is a whinge about a soft drinks.

The other night in a Doncaster pub, I wanted a drink of lemonade. I was served with R Whites, out of a 2l bottle and it cost £1.25 for a half pint glass.

More recently, I had some draught R Whites, and this was £2.50 for a pint.

I realise pubs have overheads, but £2.50 per pint???

According to mysupermarket.com, the beverage is 80p per 2l bottle at Tesco and Asda, and 97p in Sainsburys. Allowing for ice, I was probably served 275ml, which works out at 11p. Being charged £1.25 works out more that 1000{fb3ea2a882e48d0e4b8b3276b251e5656d46f860aae55d881c5c098b5b38d1a0} markup!!!

I’ve not shopped around, but using Google, the first people to show R Whites lemonade postmix (alesdistribution.com), allowing 1 part postmix to 6 parts water, 500ml of drink to the customer works out about the same price as the bottle.

Yes, ice, glass washing, gas and staff costs all cost money, but this is an absolute rip off and doing nothing towards supporting those who don’t really want to drink for various reasons – health, driving etc. Beer is cheaper!

Oh, and don’t get me started on the pub that charged a pound for a pint of soda water…

Belgian smoking laws gone mad?

After the mammoth trip sourcing beer, we had a bit of time spare so we headed to a small cafe (that shall remain nameless) for a bite to eat.

Now, whereas I prefer to visit bars that are non smoking, some of them are not and that’s a fact of life. Some pubs in the UK get around their smoking ban by erecting shelters that often do little to keep cigarette smoke out of the bar area.

As I understand it, the law in Belgium now states that if you are a bar under a certain size then you can allow smoking. If you are over a certain size then you must have a separate area, but judging by some of these, the separate area just needs to be a different bit of the bar – there needs to be no partition or anything!

Anyway, when we arrived at the bar-that-is-unnamed, the menu on the wall had gone. I asked the lady if they did food, and she more or less said that they did it ‘on the side’ and we would have to eat it in a separate room otherwise if she was caught by the authorities, she would have to “pay an amount”!

We had our meal in the separate room, and it was still just as smoky as the main room…