Enjoying a pint of beer is one of those traditionally English things to do. But long gone are the days when colleagues crammed into the nearest local for an after-work pint in the week before heading home for dinner and bed.

The cost of socialising in pubs has gone up and pubs are now struggling to draw in the punters.

The story is the same across the country, despite the price of a standard pint of beer varying greatly from one end of the country to another.

A recent survey found the cheapest pint was in Herefordshire, at £3.10, with the most expensive in London at £3.92. That’s hardly surprising, but those prices are for your standard beer. Lager costs more and craft ales, particularly those with a higher alcohol content, can cost upwards of £4.

North Essex sits somewhere in the middle, says Alan Wareham, chairman of the Colchester and North Essex branch of the Campaign for Real Ale (Camra).

“Camra does its own surveys of this kind and one thing that surprises me is the higher cost of a pint in Scotland,” says Alan.

“A fair bit of drinking goes on in pubs in Scotland and yes, there may be transport costs, but pubs are used well, yet the average cost of a pint in Scotland is £3.53, and the Scottish Islands £3.85.

“In my experience, Colchester sits somewhere in the middle, at around £3.30 a pint.

“Pubs’ ability to charge a price is based on what they paid for their beer. The freehouses can get better deals than the tied pubs, who have to buy their beer from the company that owns the pub, at a higher price.

Sometimes being a tied pub can cost a landlord 60 to 80 per cent more for their beer and then people wonder why pubs are going out of business.”

The survey, called Mapping the Price of a Pint by Citybase, listed Cornwall, Northamptonshire and Yorkshire as among the cheapest places to find a pint.

Kent, Surrey and Sussex were in the top 12 most expensive. Essex was not mentioned on the list.

The survey then compared UK prices to European prices.

Again, prices varied between 72p a pint in the Czech Republic to £5 in Sweden.

Among the factors in the high cost of a pint is tax, says Alan.

He explains: “The UK has the second highest amount of beer duty in the whole of Europe – 52p in every pint goes to the Government. Germans pay 4p a pint in taxation.

“Our Government did scrap its beer duty escalator in 2013, but by then the cost of a pint had soared so much – by 42 per cent since the escalator was brought in in 2008 – we don’t feel the benefits of it being scrapped.

“Now cutting beer duty by 1p doesn’t make too much of a difference. Scrapping the escalator has now helped stabilise the price of beer, though.”

The price of pints in a pub seems all the more expensive due to supermarkets selling cutprice alcohol. Pubs can’t compete with the low prices charged by supermarkets, and as such paying £3.30 for a pint of beer in a pub seems too much.

Alan says: “It’s killing pubs.

People are now drinking at home more and not in a controlled environment, such as a pub.

“This sort of drinking at home has been linked to potential flash points in town centres, when people go out already fuelled up with alcohol, then go on to cause trouble.

“Of course, supermarkets are not totally to blame for this, but it hasn’t helped.”

The Bird in Hand : Halstead

THE Bird InHand is tied to pub company Enterprise Inns and landlord Shaun Smith has to buy all his beer through the company.

“To buy a pint in my pub a real ale would cost £3.30 and lager £3.40, but that’s for a standard lager. Premium lager such as Grolsch and Stella cost about £4 a pint. It also depends on the alcohol content – the higher the alcophol content, the higher the cost of the beer.”

Shaun is a fan of beer and considers beer his hobby. As a result he is no stranger to paying £15 for a 10 per cent ABV beer when he visits London.

And for his enjoyment at home, he can sometimes spend up to £41 for a bottle of 41 per cent speciality Brewdog beer.

“That is something you drink as youwould a spirit, definitely not in pints! But beer is my personal hobby. It’s not something I would sell in the Bird inHand!” he adds.

The Victoria Inn, Colchester

THE Victoria Inn, a freehouse, is considered Colchester Camra’s flagship pub. Prices here are spot on Alan Wareham’s prediction of average.

Landlord AndrewPilgrim, who runs the pub with partner Sheena Valentine, says: “A standard pint of lager here costs £3.40, with a standard strength beer £3.30.

Higher strength beer costs more because duty is more.

“In fact, the reason beer is so expensive in pubs in the UK is because of the duty.

“When we buy beer, and the breweries have had to increase their costs, we try to swallow those costs as a pub. As a result, we make less on each pint. Even if beer duty has been frozen, some breweries do increase their costs anyway, which some pubs have to pass on to their customers.

“The benefit of being a freehouse is we can go to the smaller breweries, which don’t have the same duty costs as larger breweries that produce in greater volumes.

“That has helped small breweries flourish. In the last few years we have gone from having aout 850 breweries in the UK, to more than 1,400.

“Tomake a comparison between a freehouse and a tied pub – wemay pay £70 for a barrel of beer, while a tied pub may pay £140 a barrel for the same beer.

“Poor landlords have to make a choice.

Do they pass the cost on to the customer so they can make their profit margin, or do they swallow as much of the cost as they can to keep beer prices low.

“If they do the latter they don’t have the money to refurbish their pubs, to invest back into the business, so the pub falls into disrepair until the pub company says, let’s sell the building to a private developer. It’s the biggest scandal that’s happening to the pub industry.”