What's a pint
worth out there?

There is a face the British make in an Oslo bar. It arrives about four seconds after the card machine swivels round, and I have watched it happen from the inside of the glass more times than I can count.

Everyone files it under Scandinavian oddity. Liquorice, slow-television, nine-pound lager. Wrong. That price is the visible tip of an argument Norway had with itself, out loud, for a century, and then settled at a ballot box.

You have to understand how big temperance got here. Chapel-led, working-class, organised in a way our lot never managed. It ran on one plain observation: in a cold poor country that drank hard, spirits wrecked more homes than anything else on the shelf. When Norway banned spirits during the First War and confirmed it by referendum in 1919, that wasn't the great and good tutting from above. People asked for it.

Prohibition failed, obviously. It always does. It failed partly because Spain and Portugal pointed out that if Norway stopped buying their wine, they'd stop buying Norwegian fish, which is the single most Nordic reason any prohibition has ever collapsed. What replaced it in 1922 is still standing: Vinmonopolet. Anything strong is sold in a government shop with no commission, no upselling, no cheerful bloke suggesting you also try the gin, and a closing time that will absolutely ruin your Saturday if you take it lightly.

Stack heavy per-unit duty on top and here we are. Alcohol in Norway isn't priced like a normal thing you buy. It's priced like a thing with a bill attached. Hospital beds, wrecked mornings, frightened kids. The state has decided the drinker should see that bill at the till rather than the taxpayer seeing it in April.

Does it work? Yes, broadly, and not for nothing. Norwegians drink noticeably less than most of Europe and the price is doing real work in that. But dear pints push drinking into the kitchen, into the duty-free bag on the ferry, into somebody's cousin's homebrew, and out of the one place with a landlord watching. Which is where I'd rather be, for obvious reasons of self-interest.

So here's the awkward bit for us. We've spent forty years wringing our hands about pubs shutting and everyone drinking more, and answering it with gestures. Norway has an actual policy. It's a brutal one, and it asks a question we don't fancy: is a cheap pint a right, or is it a discount somebody else is quietly covering?

Anyway. Skål. That'll be nine pounds twenty.

— Beerio, still slightly winded

In 1842 a Bavarian brewer in the Bohemian town of Plzeň made a pale, clear, bottom-fermented lager that looked like nothing anyone had seen in a glass before. Nearly every beer on Earth today is descended from that batch. You're welcome.

Inventing the world's dominant beer explains Czech pride. It doesn't explain Czech prices. For that you need the second thing, which is that this country has decided, across governments that agreed on almost nothing else, that a beer in a pub is not a luxury.

They drink more of me per head than anybody, and have done for thirty years running. The hospoda isn't a night out. It's the room where the town talks. It's where the dissidents met. It's where the football gets settled. It's where a half-litre lands in front of you without being ordered, because the fella with the tray has known you since you were nineteen and doesn't need the conversation.

Governments here have repeatedly treated draught beer as infrastructure rather than vice, keeping the tap price down while duty on spirits climbs. There's cold logic in it. A nation drinking twelve-degree lager sitting among neighbours is a completely different public-health problem from a nation drinking spirits standing up in a kitchen.

That famous line about beer being cheaper than water is true in the way that matters, which is that a half-litre of tank Pilsner in a village pub will undercut the mineral water on the same menu. Tourists find this hilarious. Czechs find it correct.

The threat now is the one we've already lived through: village pubs shutting, the young ones drinking less, Prague's centre pricing itself for stag parties while the rest of the country holds the line. Go soon. Go somewhere small. Sit down and don't ask for the menu.

— Beerio, who has never felt more welcome

I'm a pint, so understand that it costs me something to say nice things about wine. But this one's too good to sit on.

Take the chalk under Champagne and follow it west. It doesn't stop at the French coast. It dives under the Channel and comes up again as the North Downs of Kent and the South Downs of Sussex. Same seam. Same white rock. Same drainage. For two thousand years that was the only thing the two places had in common, because an English summer couldn't ripen a grape to save its life.

That's gone, and it went quickly. Growing-season temperatures in southern England now sit roughly where Champagne's were a few decades back. That is exactly the window where Chardonnay and Pinot Noir make thin, sharp, wound-up base wine. Grim to drink flat. Magnificent after a few years on its lees turning into something with bubbles in it.

The French clocked it before we did. Taittinger went and planted vines near Chilham in Kent, the first Champagne house to properly commit to English soil. Pommery teamed up with a Hampshire producer. These aren't gift-shop stunts. They're hedges, taken out by families who think in centuries and have spent thirty years watching their own harvest dates creep earlier.

Now, the pub version of this story is that the French are moving to England, and it needs a correction. I'm going to be insufferable about it, because someone will try this on you at a table and you should win. The houses buying Kentish chalk are from Champagne, up in the cool north-east. The south of France has a completely different and much nastier problem: not a gentle warming into the sweet spot, but heat spikes, drought, smoke, and harvests coming in so early and so loaded with sugar that the wine arrives at fifteen percent whether the grower wanted it or not. Down there the answer is to climb. Higher slopes, north-facing sites, old heat-hardy varieties that went out of fashion when the weather was mild.

So it isn't a migration. It's the whole map being dragged north a few hundred miles. England gets the sweet spot Champagne is leaving behind. Champagne gets what Burgundy used to have. The Languedoc gets a problem.

There's an obvious joke about England finally getting decent weather at the precise moment everyone else stops enjoying theirs. Order a glass of the Kentish stuff and make it. Just know that the reason it's any good is the same reason a grower in Provence is out picking at four in the morning in the dark.

— Beerio, magnanimous in defeat

Every other drink on the bar is defined by what it tastes like. The shot is the only one defined by how fast you can get rid of it. I've watched this happen next to me for a hundred years and I still don't fully approve.

It started as a lab result. Distillation got refined by alchemists working in Arabic across the medieval Islamic world, and the kit reached European monasteries and the medical school at Salerno by around the twelfth century. What came off the still wasn't a drink. It was a drug. Concentrated, preserving, faintly miraculous, and they named it accordingly. Aqua vitae. Water of life. You can still hear it in aquavit, in eau de vie, and, via Gaelic, in the word whisky.

Medicine comes in doses and doses come in measures, which is where the dram comes from. Not a lovely Scottish word for a generous pour. An actual apothecary weight, down from the Greek drachma. The Scots kept the word long after anyone was pretending the stuff was a prescription. Those measures on the optic behind the bar, 25ml or 35ml if you're somewhere that likes you, are the legislated great-grandchildren of a chemist's scale.

The glass itself is a newcomer. American, roughly turn of the twentieth century, thick-based so it could survive being slammed down on wood, which tells you what it was designed for. The word is newer still, and I need you to hear this next bit clearly: cowboys did not pay for whiskey with a bullet. That story turns up far too late and far too neatly to be anything but invented. The dull likely answer is the ordinary English sense of a shot: a single quick go at something.

What actually made the modern shot was the back half of the twentieth century, when the drinks trade worked out that a small measure with a ritual bolted on sells considerably better than a small measure on its own. Salt, tequila, lime. The thing dropped into the other thing. The tray of luminous nonsense carried overhead at half eleven. None of that is ancient. It's marketing, and it's very good marketing, aimed exactly at the moment a group of people needs an excuse to agree on something together.

Which is worth knowing, because the older spirit cultures do the opposite. In Poland, in Russia, across the Balkans, the little glass goes with food, at a table, after somebody has stood up and said something. Same volume. Same strength. Completely different machine. One is built to hold an evening still. The other is built to shove it down a hill.

There's a setting in the league table called the spirit index. It counts how many shots you get for the price of one of me. Most of the world sits below one, which means a pint is the better way to spend your money.

South Korea sits at two. Two shots of soju for the price of a beer, and nowhere else is close. Russia and Moldova follow at around one and a quarter, and you can trace a belt of it running east from the Balkans.

Norway and Britain also score high, and before you get excited, that is the opposite phenomenon. Nobody in Oslo thinks spirits are cheap. It's that beer duty has been pushed so far that a measure of gin has quietly caught up with a pint. Same number on the index, completely different story behind it, which is roughly the whole problem with indices.

— Beerio, sat here going flat while you do that

Every cheapest-beer-in-the-world list makes the same mistake. It tells you what I cost and says nothing whatsoever about who's paying.

A pound-ten pint in Hanoi and a nine-twenty pint in Oslo look like opposite ends of the universe. Divide each by what an hour of local work pays and they get uncomfortably close. Norway is expensive. Norway is not, for Norwegians, especially unaffordable. Vietnam is astonishingly cheap. Vietnam is not, for most Vietnamese, especially cheap.

That's why the league table has a setting called pints per hour worked. It puts the local price against a rough local net hourly wage and answers the only question that has ever mattered on a Friday: how long have I got to work for the next one?

The results rearrange the furniture. Switzerland comes top at just over four pints an hour, despite charging six-forty a go. Czechia is seventh. Norway, the most notorious rip-off in Europe, sits 33rd out of 165, which is comfortably in the top quarter. Meanwhile Vietnam, where a pint costs about a pound ten, ranks 58th, and India sits down at 129th on well under a pint an hour.

Holiday economics and living-there economics are not the same economics. Forgetting that is how you end up smug in a bar where nobody local could afford your round.

One more warning, since we're being honest. Every figure on this thing is a national average, and a country is not a price. Britain is not £5.20. Britain is £4.20 in a Newcastle boozer and seven quid in a Soho pub with filament bulbs, and the average is a number that describes neither of them. Look at the spread bar on the country card before you win an argument with one of my figures.

The Big Mac index does this for currencies. This does it for the only commodity that matters, and I'm not taking questions on that.

— Beerio, the unit of account

Iceland went dry in 1915. Then Spain, which enjoyed selling wine and buying Icelandic fish, made its position known, and wine came back in the early twenties. Spirits followed in 1935. And me? Another fifty-four years in the cold.

The argument was that I was too cheap and too casual. That unlike a bottle of spirits kept in a cupboard for occasions, I'd get drunk every day by everybody including the young. Weak near-beer stayed legal, so a proud national tradition developed of spiking it with vodka, which I'd say rather undermined the case.

The ban finally went on 1 March 1989. They still mark it. Bjórdagurinn, Beer Day. People queued. Bars ran dry. I've never had a better afternoon.

The postscript is the interesting part, mind. Prices stayed savage, because the prohibition ended and the philosophy behind it didn't. Iceland kept the tax. It just stopped pretending I was the enemy, which honestly is about as much as I ask of anyone.

— Beerio, vindicated, expensive