There’s nothing dads are better at than telling you about the good ol’ days.
Last weekend, I had a conversation with the dad of one of my friends — and in particular, about the heyday of beer prices in Utah. In the ‘60s, I was told, you could buy a six-pack of Fisher Beer for just $1. Used Fisher Beer cans on eBay seem to verify this.
Of course, we’ve had decades of inflation since then, so $1 then is worth about $10 now. It checks out. But it got me thinking about rising beer prices overall. As with everything else, beer simply costs more than it did two, five, or ten years ago... but how much more?
But instead of looking at the cost of a six-pack, I’m more interested in the cost of beers at drinking establishments than the ones I can take home with me. I decided to look at the list of bars in Salt Lake County, and compare beer prices for as many of them as I could.
This is high-utility journalism, folks. What bars sell beer for which prices? Where can you get a cheap pint? Keep reading.
Collecting the data
With grand optimism at the beginning of the week, I vowed to collect beer prices for every bar in Salt Lake County. There are about 200 bar liquor licenses issued by the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Services in the county, and I wanted to find the price of a pint of beer on draft at every bar.
I started out by looking up every bar website I could find with beer prices on it. I also looked at the Yelp and Google pages for menu photos; I accepted anything taken in the last 3 months. This only garnered me prices for about 30 to 40 bars. Then, I called the rest of the bars on the list of 200, many of them multiple times. If you’re a bartender who got an annoying phone call asking about the price of a pint of beer on draft this week... that was me.
But in the end, reality struck me hard. I only ended up with information from 115 bars. That’s 57% — a D in some schools, but an F in most. What happened?
• Many bars simply don’t answer their phone. In the age of spam calls, I can sympathize. I can also sympathize if bartenders were busy serving actual customers, instead of making sure they talked to me. Some don’t list their phone numbers on the internet — maybe they don’t even have phones.
• Many bars on the DABS list weren’t open when I was making the calls this week. While I called at all times of day and night, many bars are only open on weekends — especially nightclubs and dance clubs. Some are licenses for event spaces, private clubs, military clubs, or country clubs, open rarely or not at all to the general public. Bars at ski resorts are mostly closed for the summer. Hotel bars can have extremely limited hours.
• Some bars don’t sell beer on draft at all, like some cocktail bars, wine bars, or cideries. Note, too, that bars with restaurant licenses wouldn’t appear on the DABS list I have.
Still, 115 is a lot of bars. I’m proud of my failing grade.
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) The cost of beer has risen beyond inflation since 2014, like at Lucky 13 in Salt Lake City.
At each bar I reached, I asked about the cheapest pint of beer on draft, as well as what a pint of a typical locally brewed beer would cost. I have sorted those into “cheapest pint price” and “good beer pint price” in the table below — with apologies to the Anheuser-Busch national conglomerate, locally brewed beers simply taste much better in my opinion than the cheap lagers like Bud Light and Miller. At many bars, the cost of all beers on draft was the same.
Also worth noting: some bars don’t have pint glasses, instead serving their beers in half-liter (roughly 17 oz), imperial pints (20 oz), or other weird shapes. Where possible, I tried to adjust that odd serving size to the cost of beer per 16 ounces. Bars were also inconsistent about telling me their prices pre- or post-tax. So it goes.
It is possible, even likely, I have messed up somewhere — a website had outdated information, or a bartender told me something wrong. If you’d like to correct a mistake, or simply add a Salt Lake County bar I wasn’t able to reach to this list, email me and I’ll get it sorted out.
The list of beer prices
In the end, here’s the list of 115 bars, sorted alphabetically. Click through the pages or use the search function to find a bar in particular:
Of course, you may also just be looking for the cheapest pints possible. You can sort by that column if you’d like by clicking the column header.
In the end, the cheapest beer I found on draft was at the Bongo Lounge, at about 2965 S. Highland Dr. The bar, which says it’s been around since 1950, sells domestic beers for $2.50 a pint, while a more premium beer will cost you $3.50 per pint. (The bar saves partially by avoiding credit card fees; it is a cash only bar.) Willie’s Lounge, about a half-mile south of Smith’s Ballpark, meanwhile, has the cheapest local brews at $3 per pint.
Some of the most expensive beer was found at the Thirsty Squirrel bar up at Solitude Mountain Resort — a bit unfair, because I wasn’t able to find pint prices at the other ski resort bars because they were closed. They charge $8 for a most pints, though do offer Pabst Blue Ribbon at $4.50 per pint. The hotel bar at the Salt Lake City Marriott at the Gallivan Center, Lofte’s Bar and Grill, and the swanky Lake Effect in downtown Salt Lake City also charge $7 for a pint of beer on draft at minimum, while the Marriott also charges $9 for some beers.
Beer on draft prices in Salt Lake County basically follow a bell curve shape, as you might expect. Beers at $5 and $6 were most common, with prices in between those amounts less so.
Finally, it was difficult to get data on changing beer prices at bars. The only way I could find this data locally was through user-posted images of bar menus on websites like Yelp and Google. But many bars don’t have priced menus to photograph. Most bars full of regulars don’t take many photos of menus, either — it’s the more popular bars for tourists, frankly, that end up seeing these menus posted online. And finally, just a huge percentage of bars in Salt Lake County are relatively new, and wouldn’t have a history to sort through even if it were online.
In the end, I decided to look at 5 Salt Lake City bars that did have this sort of history online. Then, I compared their rising prices to the rate of inflation. A $4 beer in 2014 would cost $4.98 in 2023, simply from inflation alone.
Lucky 13 has seen the biggest price increases of the bars in this sample — the bar used to have a wide variety of beers at $3, before it went to only Bud Light-esque beers to $3 in the latter part of the 2010s, and finally raised the price of even that to $5.50 in the last year. Squatters, actually, has seen the smallest jump of the bars listed here — but there’s a catch. Their beer glasses increased in size from half-liter sizes (just under 17 oz) to 20 oz imperial pint sizes, which they now sell for $7.50. That’s $6 per 16 oz of beer, but you still end up paying a lot more for “one beer,” so to speak.
In sum, we’ve simply seen prices at these bars raise beyond inflation in the rest of the consumer price index. It’s hard to scientifically extrapolate these five bars to the rest of the Salt Lake County market, but from this beer drinker’s point of view, it certainly seems like beer prices are surpassing the rate of inflation nearly everywhere. That makes some sense, given how above-inflation real estate price gains have changed rents, and how the labor market has seen a shortage of service workers.
But even if something makes sense, we don’t have to like it. So, on behalf of Salt Lake County beer drinkers everywhere: a hearty boo for the raising cost of brews.
Andy Larsen is a data columnist for The Salt Lake Tribune. You can reach him at alarsen@sltrib.com.
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