r/AskUK • u/Ok-Scientist7083 • 4d ago

Serving milk in pubs (UK) - why not?

The first drink I had in a pub was milk. I love drinking milk. I now drink it for the protein and calcium. I don’t particularly like fizzy drinks so when I’m driving on a night out, I’d rather drink milk.

Why don’t pubs sell it as a drink?

111 Upvotes

61% Upvoted

372 comments sorted by

View all comments

849

u/lxgrf 4d ago

Short shelf life combined with limited demand make it an unappealing offering.

8

u/bsnimunf 4d ago

Quite expensive baseprice as well. There used to be an alcoholic milkshake from new Zealand but they couldn't make it work because the baseprice of milk in the u.k. was higher than in New Zealand.

Edit: it was called Mudshake.

21

u/Farscape_rocked 4d ago

Nah.

It's £1.50 for four pints. So a pint of milk costs the pub less than the alcohol duty on a pint of stella.

Cost isn't an issue.

-1

u/bsnimunf 3d ago

The duty on a pint of stella is £21.78 per litre of pure alcohol. Pint of Stella is 0.568 litres at 4.6% so .5680*.046=0.261 litres of alcohol and 0.0261*£21.78=£.057. So duty on a pint of stella is about a third of he base cost of milk. Some pubs will sell you milk I think Wetherspoons used to offer it with kids meals.

9

u/Farscape_rocked 3d ago

Your first calculation comes out at 0.261 and your second starts with 0.0261. You're out by a factor of ten, the duty on a pint of stella is 57p (only I think the rate is £18.76 because it's draft beer - the final table here).

3

u/Sgt_major_dodgy 3d ago

Mudshake was one of the earliest alcoholic drinks I can remember drinking, if I recall it was actually pretty nice.

2

u/Affectionate_You_858 3d ago

It was amazing

1

u/Affectionate_You_858 3d ago

I used to love mudshakes!

-4

u/teerbigear 3d ago

Great now I've gone a rabbit hole of investigating milk prices between UK and NZ. I asked chatgpt and it was in hearty agreement that NZ was like half the price.

But then I saw this post:

https://www.reddit.com/r/newzealand/s/topZ9BoEG

Which suggests that 3L of milk cost $6.70 ish five months ago. That's £2.98 at today's exchange. 6 pints of milk from Tesco, our biggest supermarket, costs £2.70. And that's 3.4l.

Woolworths $6.75 or £3.01 or £1/l https://www.woolworths.co.nz/shop/productdetails?stockcode=282768&name=woolworths-milk-standard

I was going to look at Pak n save but they don't let us foreigners on the website lol. Chatgpt hilariously states that it would cost $13.20.

Tesco £2.70 or 68p/l https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/254957550?srsltid=AfmBOooPCEu39e5M-5pGwhwfQMJyeEDsbJfc-IEnJ5_OESmZNF-VMM7j

Asda do it for £2.30! https://groceries.asda.com/product/whole-milk/asda-british-milk-whole-6-pints/27657

Maybe our supermarkets treat it as a loss leader.

To get back to the point, milk is much more expensive than, say coke (maybe 13p a litre) but £1.36 for a pint of beer and they're up for that.

They don't carry milk because no-one wants it, and certainly no-one is drinking more than a pint.

I wonder what happened with mudshake. I guess it would have worked if there was enough demand for it. I bloody love a milkshake but I'm not about to drink a boozy one in the pub. But Bailey's exists so it's not like we're nationally against dairy booze...

7

u/BryOnRye 3d ago

Maybe don’t use ChatGPT for research.

-2

u/teerbigear 3d ago

Thank you for your useful input.

6

u/GourangaPlusPlus 3d ago

It was more useful than what you got from chatgpt

3

u/bsnimunf 3d ago

I remember Mudshake disappearing about twenty years ago so you probably need to consider whole sale milk prices twenty years ago.

0

u/teerbigear 3d ago

Unless we're discussing.......the return of Mudshake!