Map shows where the cheapest pint of Guinness in the UK is – and where it’ll cost £10

Tens of thousands of pubs got a rather polite phone call over the Easter Bank Holiday weekend, asking how much a pint of Guinness was.

The voice on the other end of the line wasn’t a person, but an AI bot called ‘Rachel’ tasked with phoning pubs to gather prices for the Guinndex.

Rachel, which has an accent inspired by Rachel Duffy from The Traitors, found the prices of 6,500 of the nearly 36,000 pubs she (it?) rang up.

The map shows that a pint of the Irish dry stout will set you back £10 in Maldon but just £2.50 in a Wetherspoons in Sittingbourne.

Overall, the average price tag of a Guinness is £5.82 – in London, it’s a whopping £6.72, while in Scotland it is a far less shocking £5.20.

The North-South divide can be seen in the ‘Guinness equator’ line, where the average price of a pint anywhere below Oxford, Cambridge and Norwich is £6.18, 73p lower than down south.

After an Ireland-exclusive version of Guinndex was published earlier this month, the UK-wide map came out today.

Rachel, a powerful autonomous model called an AI agent, was built by Matt Cortland, a software engineer from New Jersey living in the UK.

Matt, 37, tells Metro that the idea for Guinndex came after a Dublin bartender told him it would be €7.80 (£6.80) for a pint of Guinness.

‘I was like, “what the f**k is going on?”,’ he recalls. ‘You can literally go two streets over and pay €6.20, so it didn’t make any sense.’

One reason Matt made the Irish Guinndex was that officials stopped charting the cost of the black liquid in 2011.

‘Then there’s no more data at all. In 2011, the price of a pint of stout was €3.93, to go from that to all of a sudden €7.80.’

Matt, who created Guinndex with Irish AI researcher John Fleming, said just 4% of UK bartenders and pub landlords who picked up the phone clocked they were speaking with a bot.

Transcripts of some of those conversations, seen by Metro, showed they had rather mixed reactions either way.

‘Oh, piss off,’ one staff member at the Kevill Arms in Great Yarmouth told Rachel.

Others called Rachel ‘Rach’, ‘darling’ or ‘babes’ before telling it the price tag, while some jokingly said a pint costs £593.

At The Earl of Normanton, Wiltshire, where a Guinness costs £5.60, a staffer said: ‘You think I ought to know that off the top of my head.

‘That’s the problem with, uh, technology.’

As well as Guinness prices, Matt and John also tallied the ‘weird and wonderful names’ of Britain’s more than 46,000 pubs.

Wellington was the most common historical name printed on pub signs, at 126, followed by Nelson (100) and Robin (62).

They found 7.2% of English pubs are named after royalty, lowering to 5.4% in Wales, 3.3% in Scotland and 1.3% in Northern Ireland.

‘The pub signs tell you more about the Union than any opinion poll,’ Matt and John say.

Matt adds: ‘Also, how many cock pubs there are is pretty funny.’ (It was 117, by the way.)

Why is a pint of Guinness so expensive now?

How much a pint of beer costs has been increasing for years, with figures showing it cost just 93p in 1987. In 2024, it was £4.77, a 413% increase.

Even with a high price tag, Guinness was Britain’s top beer by volume that year, according to hospitality data consultancy NIQ.

The dark, creamy stout has gone from an old-timer’s drink to Gen Z’s go-to, becoming so popular that there was a brief Guinness shortage in 2024.

But pubs have struggled with inflation and the coronavirus pandemic in recent years, causing higher costs for staffing and licensing requirements.

One pub in England and Wales shut its doors every day last year, with many demolished or converted for other uses.

Inflation is creeping up amid the US and Israel’s war against Iran, which is impacting oil prices – the pain is being felt at the petrol and lager pumps.

Individual pubs set the price of Guinness, rather than the brewery giant, Diageo, making Matt believe pubs are exploiting tourists to cover costs.

‘I’ve owned pubs before, I know what it’s like to deal with rising costs and improvements and other overheads,’ the AI engineer says.

‘But there’s a difference between reasonably charging something and taking advantage.’

Most publicans have welcomed Guinndex, Matt adds, with some lowering their prices or asking to be pinned on the map with pride.

Still, the dataset isn’t a name and shame. All he’s doing is listing what price is scribbled on the chalkboard menus behind bartenders.

‘I’m trying to highlight hidden gems that do really good things as much as possible,’ Matt adds.

‘But if you’re charging €10, that’s what you’re charging people publicly, that should be fair enough information.’

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