Recently I’ve discovered true utopia. A fertile oasis in an otherwise barren wasteland. Around the corner from the house I moved into a short time ago lies a pub. A standard, inner-Melbourne pub, by all accounts. Recently renovated. Plenty of places to sit down. Footy on with sound during the winter months. But they have $9 pints. $9 pints of actually good beer. $9 pints as standard. Not just for Happy Hour. Not only on Black Friday. Not even limited to the Sunday Sesh. $9 pints all day, every day, of a really good froth. And that brings me to the only core belief I hold that would ever cause me to burn City Hall to the ground single-handedly: Beer simply cost too much.
[jwplayer PTSpeyo8]
At the vast majority of pubs around the country, the dilemma is the same. Beer? It cost far too much. It cost unholy amounts of money.
Charging untold amounts of money for a pint of big farty pinecone beer flies in the face of why I go to the pub in the first place.
Don’t get me wrong here, I love a beer that tastes like I’m sucking off a bush just as much as the next spaghetti jaffle-lookin’ urban lumberjack. What I don’t like is feeling like I have to fork out the GDP of Laos just to get a full glass of the stuff.
In fact, the beer industry as a whole should be nationalised and regulated. No beer on god’s green earth should cost a brass razoo more than $10 for a pint. I don’t care what kind of shaman magic you’ve performed on it while brewing. $10 a pint. Absolute maximum.
Jammed 15 off-season blood oranges into each glass? $10 a pint.
Brewed up a quadruple IPA that’ll knock you on your ass harder than a swift kick from a cassowary? That’s $10 thanks, brother.
The Queen’s dogs took a paddle and a piss in the vat before you bottled this sumbitch up? Mate, that’ll be $10.
The pub is home. It is a big wet lounge. I should not have to declare bankruptcy just to get brain fuzzy on Mr Golden Water’s magical yum juice. I should be able to leap in at 6, limp out at 12, get a kebab and a taxi home and still have enough cash left over to get the largest serving of fried potat that the local chippo is legally allowed to serve me the next day. I should not, under any circumstances, be forced to endure this hellish world we apparently live in where I’m forking out a house deposit for some farty beard boy’s yellow milkshake that might taste like a butt.
Legislate it. Enforce it in the courts. No pint of beer in any establishment in this burning jacaranda of a country should cost anything more than a flat $10.
If god forbid I ever decide politics is a red hot idea, this is the platform I’ll be running on.
