Henry Kirby in London -
Krakow, Kyiv and Bratislava have taken the crown as the three cheapest cities in the world for beer, according to a study by travel price comparison site GoEuro.
Its Beer Price Index measured the prices of 33cl beers in supermarkets and bars across the world, using a basket of the five most popular imported beers in the world alongside the main local brew in each country.
Krakow and Kyiv both had an overall price per beer of $1.66, with Bratislava following closely at $1.69. With Belgrade in eighth place, Central and Eastern European (CEE) cities made up four of the ten cheapest spots for beer.
Geneva was the most expensive city measured by beer price, as the first bne:Chart shows. The recent appreciation of the Swiss franc now means that, at $6.32 a bottle, a round of three beers would leave you with little over a euro in change from €20. In Krakow, the same amount would get you ten beers and leave you with enough change for some frytki on your (wobbly) walk home.
While Delhi sat in fifth place overall in the Beer Price Index at $1.75 a bottle, the average annual consumption there is only 6 litres, less than one 20th of Krakow’s 127 litres. On this measure, Bucharest comes out on top, at 133 litres consumed per person, per year – over one 33cl beer every day of the year.
CEE’s love for beer is even more apparent when each city’s average annual expenditure on beer per person is taken as a percentage of its country’s per-capita GDP. Using this measure, ten of the top-20 cities in the world are from CEE, as the second bne:Chart shows. Both Kyiv and Bucharest spend over 12% of their annual incomes on beer.
Explore the global results of the Beer Price Index using the interactive map below. Hover over a city for further information.
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