The cost-of-drinking crisis: Has Gen Z’s performative love of Guinness ruined it for the rest of us?

The great Guinness revival should have been the kind of unqualified success story the British pub trade rarely gets any more. A drink once relegated to the “old man” end of the bar has become the defining pint of a new generation, its creamy dome and slow-setting body turning up everywhere from TikTok feeds to celebrity Instagram posts. Kim Kardashian drinks it. The Princess of Wales has been photographed necking one. You can hardly move for twenty-somethings filming the crema settle at Guinness pilgrimage sites like The Devonshire. Gen Z has given the black stuff something money can’t buy: cultural clout.

But behind the aesthetic pours and viral “perfect pint” hunts lies a more awkward truth. Guinness might be cooler than ever, but it has also become one of the most expensive drinks for pubs to stock – and one of the hardest for cash-strapped young drinkers to justify. At the very moment the stout achieved near-mythic status, the people pouring it and the people buying it are finding it increasingly difficult to afford.

That tension has now erupted into a full-blown price war, with Heineken-owned Murphy’s quietly muscling its way onto British bars by offering something almost unthinkable: a stout that makes pubs more money.

So, what happens when Britain’s most fashionable pint becomes unsustainable for the very people who made it famous?

Guinness’s unlikely cultural renaissance has been building for a while. Its shift from heritage pint to Gen Z calling card is well documented: the TikTok hunt for the “perfect pour”, the obsessive ranking of pubs based on head height and temperature. Guinness has always had brand power, but this was different. It wasn’t loyalty; it was fandom. Guinness has become the matcha latte of the pub: a status drink, endlessly photographed, fetishised for its ritual, and often consumed more for the performance than the pint itself.

The numbers tell the story. Guinness overtook Carling in 2022 to become the bestselling beer in British pubs. It now accounts for one in every nine pints poured across the UK. A drink once dismissed as niche is now a cultural phenomenon.

But success has consequences, and pubs are the ones feeling them. What most drinkers don’t realise is that Guinness is, for many operators, the least profitable drink on the bar. Publicans report that wholesale prices have risen repeatedly, leaving them with razor-thin margins. Speaking to The Times, one pub company figure called Guinness “incredibly expensive”, adding that pubs have “nowhere to turn in a negotiation” because the brand knows it has them in a chokehold. Another said it is “the lowest percentage margin product in most pubs’ range”.

The numbers again are striking. An 88-pint keg of Guinness now costs between £150 and £155, while the equivalent keg of Murphy’s costs £130 to £135 – roughly 20 per cent cheaper. Drinkers might assume Murphy’s is priced lower at the bar because it’s a lesser-known brand; in reality, pubs can’t convince customers to pay Guinness money for a non-Guinness product.

Meanwhile, some London pubs are charging £7 to £8 for a pint of Guinness, while the national average sits somewhere between £5.75 and £5.13, depending on the venue. If ever there was a pint that illustrated the cost-of-drinking crisis, it’s the one that currently tops every bar chart. The irony, of course, is that the more Gen Z has hyped up Guinness, the more its desirability – and scarcity – have nudged the price upwards. When a drink becomes social currency, it rarely stays affordable for long.

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And yet, pubs can’t simply remove it. Guinness is more than a product; it’s a footfall generator. It’s a bind familiar to many operators: Guinness makes the least profit, but ditching it risks losing loyal customers altogether. The brand is so powerful, so culturally entrenched, that even when it’s bad for the bottom line, pubs keep pouring it.

This is precisely the vulnerability Heineken spotted. A nationwide shortage of Guinness in late 2024 and early 2025 left pubs scrambling. That’s when Murphy’s moved. Heineken’s sales director, Will Rice, said that “hundreds of new pubs” began stocking Murphy’s during the shortage. By November 2025, the number had risen to 1,550 outlets, according to internal Heineken data. James Nye, managing director of Anglian Country Inns, said that Guinness “keeps putting price increase after price increase through”, adding that the brand is “outpricing themselves in the market”.

Murphy’s isn’t pretending to be anything new. It’s a classic Irish stout, founded in 1856 and bought by Heineken in 1983, similar enough to Guinness in flavour and appearance to satisfy the casual drinker. But its appeal to pubs is obvious: cheaper to buy, easier to make money on, a safety valve during a time of soaring energy costs and labour bills. What Murphy’s doesn’t have, of course, is a small army of content creators breathlessly declaring it “elite” every weekend. And in 2025, that seems to matter almost as much as taste.

Whether it can truly challenge Guinness is another matter. It’s a good product, but it’s not Guinness. And, crucially, drinkers know it.

The Guinness-Murphy’s rivalry isn’t just a competitive skirmish between two stout producers. It’s a symptom of a much bigger change in British drinking culture; one that becomes more apparent the moment you look at the rise of the 60/40 pint.

When a Dublin pub posted a video of its new 60/40 Guinness – a blend of 60 per cent Guinness 0.0 and 40 per cent regular Guinness – it divided the internet instantly. The hybrid pour drops the ABV from the usual 4.2 per cent to roughly 1.7 per cent. For some drinkers, especially younger ones, this was ingenious: all the flavour, less alcohol and presumably a cheaper round. For others, it was “illegal” and “a load of nonsense”. Part of the fury comes from older drinkers who feel the Guinness they grew up with has been hijacked by a generation who treat it like liquid merch.

But the backlash misses the point. The 60/40 pint isn’t a gimmick. It’s part of a broader shift towards moderation, the same cultural current that has driven the rise of low-alcohol beer, no-and-low spirits and the steady normalisation of drinking less. Forty-four per cent of UK adults now choose no-and-low alcohol options, up from 31 per cent in 2018.

When you step back, the contradictions pile up. Guinness is riding its biggest popularity wave in decades, but becoming increasingly unaffordable for the pubs serving it and the people drinking it. Gen Z has turned stout into a cultural obsession while also drinking less alcohol overall. Diageo, the drinks giant behind Guinness, is relying heavily on the stout’s runaway success at a time when its spirit business is struggling, its share price has fallen by more than 25 per cent in a year and it has appointed former Tesco boss Sir Dave Lewis to spearhead a turnaround. Among traditional drinkers, there’s a growing resentment that the younger generation’s glossy Guinness worship has helped push the pint into hype territory, driving up demand, fuelling shortages and turning a simple pub order into a minor performance. Guinness hasn’t changed, but the culture swirling around it has.

The stout boom was supposed to be uncomplicated – a heritage brand reborn through sheer modern relevance. Instead, it has exposed the fragile economics of the British pub, the contradictions of a generation that both drives trends and resents high prices, and the limits of even the strongest brand loyalty when the cost of a pint threatens to outpace its cultural value.

The real question now isn’t whether Murphy’s can dethrone Guinness. It’s whether any pub can afford to keep pouring the pint that Gen Z turned into a phenomenon. If even Guinness feels the squeeze, the future of the British pint may be entering its most precarious era yet.