Dave70
Le roi est mort..
- Joined
- 29/9/08
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A recent trip to Northern Europe highlighted how expensive beer is in this country.
A couple of examples:
A small, independent Belgian brewery: 6-pack of mixed (i.e. triple/dubbel/brune) bottles of 6-7% beer for 11 euros ~ $16.
6-pack of leffe blonde in australia = $30 (sure there's transportation and all, but isn't Leffe a mass produced beer?).
6-pack of interesting 4-5% beer from a small, independent Australian brewery: $25
3 pints of industrial English ale (e.g. London Pride, Bishops Finger, etc. things you'd see in the specialty international aisle of chain bottle-shops) in UK supermarket: 5 GBP ~ $8.50.
1 pint of similar in Australia would be $8-9
1 pint of something interesting, e.g. Little Creatures is probably $6 or so.
Or, alternatively in Australia, I can buy a 12-15% 750mL bottle of death-bag wine in a bottle for about $4 from the supermarket.
Why is it so?
Lets pretend we discovered alcohol yesterday and tried to pitch it. A carcinogenic disinhibivitive psychoactive substance with a lethal threshold of around 7g per kg of bodyweight and basically a net negative effect on health overall. Not to mention costing the community in the order of 15 billion per year by way of hospitalizations, lost production, justice system etc.
To say it would never fly is beyond an understatement.
Even a cursory glance at the laundry list of substances, most of which have no lethal dose, and are freely available in other countries, that have either been classified schedule 4 by the TGA or criminalized outright should convince anybody that its a small miracle grog, and furthermore, the private manufacturer of, is even legal in Australia, let alone cheap / expensive.
Its a bit of a worry.
To badly paraphrase Martin Niemöller, 'First they came for the homebrewers'..
Devils advocacy aside, I've paid about 50 Czech koruna in Prauge - about $2.50 AUD for a pint of draught Urquell.
So yeah, we get ****** on alcohol.