City beer prices – a comparison

Oslo’s cheapest beer will set you back more than €12, while you will take almost a €9 hit for 330 ml of local bottled beer in Reykjavik. Head to Prague instead, where you can knock back some suds for €1.42. The Beer Idiots chart below shows a city-by-city comparison of the cheapest beer possible in each city.

We collected the prices from the UK Post Office’s annual City Costs Barometer 2019, which is meant as a holiday guide on prices for a range of meals, drinks and other tourist staples in 48 European cities. Of course, cheap beer is not the measure of a place, unless you are planning on holding a stag or a hen night and drinking is your only game. Strangely, Brussels is not on the list. However, Antwerp’s cheapest is €2.50 about and in Bruges it’s a crazy €3.45.

My question: €3.45 would be crazy for a Maes or Jupiler, when you can choose so many others for the same price. I know this is not true as I have been to Bruges and hung around in a student bar or two with excellent prices for some of the finest Belgium has to offer. As for Brussels, some of the cheapest beer can be found around the Brussels-North railway station. €2.20 for a Jupiler. Apparently, all the bars on the road behind the station are owned by one person and so prices are the same. Read below how the prices were determined.

Click here for a larger version of the graph.

Post Office City Costs Barometer 2019 is based on March exchange rates. Prices were supplied by tourist offices of participating cities, except for Barcelona, Belgrade, Bucharest, Hamburg, London, Madrid, Palma, Rome, Toulouse, Valencia, Venice, Verona and Zurich (researched online). Beer Idiots extracted the prices for beer and used the Post Office’s exchange rate to convert to euros.