Remember the days when a pint cost you 9d!?
By: JimOldfield
June 2nd, 2012
Your weekly wage put a kingly £7.50 in your hand, a pint of real beer (at it was all real) cost 9d – and whether you drunk it in the public bar or the carpeted saloon bar denoted your social class… spare a thought for how it was when the Queen came to the throne.
Beer website the Beer Genie has produced a fascinating feature on the beer scene, as it was in 1952.
Now in decline except in the Midlands, Mild was the most popular beer in our public bars, while bitter remained the drink of choice in the saloon bars – and while brown ale, milk stout and Burton ale flourished, lager accounted for less than one per cent of the market!
It now tallies 75 per cent of beer sold in the UK, says the BBPA.
In some areas of the country, women were not allowed in certain pubs at all! And the public bar was off-limits, though there was often a “snug” that they could use.
Pub grub was almost unheard of then, while today’s pubs sell more than a BILLION meals a year… more than all of the nation’s restaurants.
And for the Queen’s Coronation, the following year, breweries such as Taylor Walker and Barclay Perkins joined more familiar names including Adnams and John Smith’s in producing celebratory ales.
