Relative value

What a treat I have for you today. Forget my hesitant foray into transatlantic ale. This will blow your socks off (if they've been soaked in nitroglycerine).

Verisimilitude. I've been meaning to use that word for ages. Ever since I heard the song. That's another one crossed off the list of "things to do before I go gaga".

Back to today's post. You're thinking "God, what will he tell us today if it's better that the gratuitous use of the word verisimilitude?" I'll give you a clue: add something that rhymes with raft to the title.

I laughed at all the graft involved in the preparation. Shaft you - I'm not daft enough to do that.

I hope you understand the concept of having a base index of 100 and hanging comparisons off it. I really hope you understand it because I can't be bottomed to explain it. Some might say my readership was small. I prefer to add a "but discerning" on the end. Or "but able to tie their own shoelaces". Or "almost literate".

Explaining that it an only slightly insulting way has distracted me from the task in hand. (As have Andrew and Alexei. In their own inimitably crazy way).

Have you looked at the table image yet? No? You lazy git. . . . . . . I'm just the same. I can never be arsed to follow links in posts.

Price-conscious. I've always been that. It partly explains my Mild-drinking. I used to think (how many times have I said that?) that the price differential between Mild and Bitter had been seriously eroded after 1970.

The unsurprising: the realtionship between price and OG is pretty constant. You can see this by comparing the price and OG index columns for Bitter. These show that the the price per point of OG was pretty much the same for Mild and Bitter. Though, in general, Bitter was cheaper (in 10 out of 12 examples). Why unsurprising? Tax was levied by OG. Tax was a considerable percentage of the cost.

The slightly surprising: Bitter was much better value in ABV terms. Look at the price and OG columns of Bitter. Only in May 1960 is the price index higher. That means (do I really have to explain all of this to you?) that only in May 1960 was Mild a cheaper way of getting the same amount of alcohol than Bitter.

The moral? Cheap isn't always better value.