Portland Beer Price Index: Autumn 2012

A quiet edition of the PBPI this quarter, after the big increases last time.  Bomber prices have come down from the all-time highs of the summer, though they are still pretty steep compared to six-packs: $15.15 is the average six-pack equivalent (SPE) price for bombers on sale.  I went ahead and put up the graph for bomber prices again to illustrate the decline but also show how bombers are still near the top of the prices I've seen over the past three years.

Here are the Portland Beer Price Index numbers for this quarter:

• 6-packs: $9.22, unchanged
• 22-ounce bombers: $4.76, down 7 cents
• 6-packs (sale price): $8.83, up 1 cent
• 22-ounce bombers (sale price): $4.63, down 5 cents
• 16 oz. draft: $4.39 unchanged
• 16 oz. draft (happy hour): $3.59, unchanged

Two notes about the composition of the index.  First, I was worried about Hopworks IPA:  a couple of the places I looked did not have any in stock, and QFC had it very obviously mismarked on the shelf (about 33% higher in price than other HUB bombers).  It made me fear that Hopworks was dropping IPA bombers now that they are canning it in tall-boys, but I have been assured by them that while there may have been a "temporary little burp in the pipeline", they are not discontinuing the HUB IPA bombers.  The other tweak I had to make was -- for the purposes of comparing to last quarter -- to pretend that QFC had Caldera Pale Ale on the shelf at the summertime price.  In fact, the prices above omit a Caldera price at QFC, because it wasn't out, and there wasn't a shelf tag for it.  Has it been bumped by the new 10 Barrel six-packs?  Or is it a temporary outage?  We shall see.

This year has flown by.  The next installment of the Portland Beer Price Index will be out around Christmas.