Back in 2018 I reflected on the price of a pint of beer throughout my lifetime, in this piece. It included various milestones (50p, £1, £5 …) and concluded, “Clearly, the next barrier to be breached will be the £6 pint”. For the record, the £6 barrier has now been breached, many times. If you are on the Guinness or any kind of premium lager you are likely to be paying in excess of £6 a pint at most pubs here in London.

The first time I knew for sure that I had broken the £6 barrier was last autumn, at The Crown on Chiswick High Road. I put aside a receipt that showed that a pint of Guinness was something like £6.40, intending to photograph it and write about it here. I don’t know where it is, so in its place here is my most recent receipt from a trip to a London pub, The Ship in Mortlake.

Yes, I bought a pint of Estrella Damm (lager). It was a hot afternoon and my daughter and I went for a long cycle ride, her first trip on a bike since way before lockdown. As you can see, the lager cost £6.40 and, just as noteworthy, a pint of lemonade cost £4.20. “Minerals”, as soft drinks used to be called, are the same price that beer was about a decade ago.

I am pretty sure that the pint of Blue Moon that I bought last month at a pub in Hammersmith was £6.70 a pint, taking us to yet another milestone: over £20 for three pints of beer. The £7 pint is not too far away.