More Thoughts on the Prices Beer Festivals (and Beer in General)

This morning I've been catching up on beer blogs and there's a couple recent posts from Portland, Oregon that have caught my attention. The first comes from It's Pub Night and he's essentially lamenting the rising price of beer festivals in Oregon. Generally in Oregon you will pay a base amount for a cup and then a dollar per ticket, each ticket gives you a 3oz-or-so pour. But some of the cups are starting to go up in price. Here's Bill:

A couple weeks ago, I thought the Hood River Hops Festival was a little cheeky for charging $6 for an empty plastic mug; then the obligatory pint glass at the Oaks Park Fresh Hops Fest was $8. The pint glass was nicer to drink from and more of a keepsake than a plastic mug; ditto the $8 tulip glass at the recent Beermongers 2nd Anniversary. Either way, $6 or $8 seems like a pretty steep price for entry...

Can you believe that people are saying that $6 and $8 entry fees are steep prices! We're over here in Colorado and we're paying $40 to get into a festival. Sure, we get all we can drink of little 1oz pours but the beer is all stuff we've had over and over and over at every festival.

Then Jeff at Beervana wrote a post about how people in Washington DC are really unhappy to be paying $6-7 for a pint of beer and he offers some of his thoughts on how the price will eventually come down. Every now and again the Portland beer blogs will have a short tirade about prices being too expensive for beers from places like Rogue Brewing. I used to side with the bloggers, thinking to myself 'Yeah Rogue is charging $5.25 for a pint of beer, that's crazy!' And it is crazy, when you can expect $4 pints anywhere you go. The problem is that here you'd be hard pressed to find a $4 pint of good beer in a regular bar or pub. Some places are charging up to $7 for a pint of beer. How about that? (Yes, I know that some beer is more expensive than your daily run of the mill beer).

I still go out, I still pay these higher prices, but I very rarely order the $7 beers, and I go out a lot less than I'd like to because it hurts my wallet. Now I'm not writing this to say that people in Portland are whining to themselves about things they shouldn't be whining about. I'm asking us, here in Colorado, how is it that we've settled for these steep prices and is there anything to be done about it? Is it a non-issue?

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