The Social Drinker

The high price of going alcohol-free

Ipaid €5.60 for a 330cl bottle of Heineken’s new alcohol-free beer in a Dublin pub the other day. The beer was good, but the price was extraordinary. That a small bottle of a non-alcoholic drink should cost more than an ordinary pint, despite excise duty, sums up much that is wrong with pubs today.

Alcohol-free beer attracts no excise duty, so it should cost less than a pint of alcoholic beer. In fact, Heineken’s alcohol-free beer is more expensive than its alcoholic equivalent in both pubs and supermarkets. That does not reflect well on Heineken, but it is also a problem for pubs which choose to sell drinks like this at outrageous prices.

Publicans have been complaining loudly about the shift away from pubs in recent years, but people will stay at home as long as pubs charge customers four times the supermarket price for a drink.

Three years ago, former Heineken Ireland chief executive Maggie Timoney told a conference that she was “surprised” to discover how unpopular the drinks industry was in Ireland — she had been working abroad for Heineken before returning to this country. She made headlines when she added that she didn’t “give a shit” if she got fired from Heineken for saying the industry must make being drunk “uncool”.

It was a good quote, but one wonders what the now US-based executive makes of the fact that it is more expensive for a Heineken drinker here to drink an alcohol-free Heineken than a normal Heineken?

Personally, I think the Government’s new measures to discourage the sale of cheap drinks is misguided, and will encourage the gangs now trading in contraband cigarettes to move into drink. But it is hard to feel sorry for the drinks industry when pubs and brewers make a designated driver pay more for his or her drinks than the drinks of the friends who will be driven home.