One man’s hunt to find out which country has the cheapest beer in the world
History books are littered with great men’s tales of travel in the search for the next new adventure.
Christopher Columbus made his great discovery by accident, stumbling into America while trying to find a westward sea route to East Asia, Ferdinand Magellan circumnavigated the world for the first time, dashing conspiracy theorists’ hope by proving the world was round, Marco Polo made a 24-year journey that kickstarted the West’s interest in Asia, something that still exists today with every anime-obsessive’s first trip to Tokyo, and then you have the likes of Roald Amundsen, the Norwegian who led the first expedition to the South Pole.
With so much of the world already discovered, mapped and well understood, it feels like our generation hasn’t been able to scratch that itch for human discovery, something that lies within all of us, except for one man, arguably the great adventurer of the modern era, the great Worldwide Wilbur, who is on an epic quest to discover the world’s cheapest beer.
The Maine-born adventurer lives like a superhero: by day, he’s a desk-jockey, working a “full-time office-cubicle type job”, only to transform into a globetrotting pint-man during his 20 days of annual vacation. His mission is to “help other people discover new places” and to push Americans to discover the world and not worry about the fears and misconceptions that can hold travellers back. He’s currently 131 countries into his dream to visit all 197 countries on the planet, and fortunately for us, he’s been taking notes about beer prices.
Of his 131 visited countries, he’s sampled a beer in 87, making this one of the most comprehensive, lived, beer rankings around, and like every great man, he has a set of codes that he lives by:
- Beers only count if they were drunk in a restaurant bar; no using convenience stores for a cheap tinnie.
- Tipping isn’t included, and the price is converted into USD based on the exchange rate on the day that he gets the beer.
- The beer must be at least 330ml, but larger beers can be included, which is great news for us pint guzzling nations.
- He only lists the cheapest pint and quality doesn’t matter; it’s strictly a cost ranking.
So, let’s start at the top, which country has the most expensive, cheapest beer, which would be Oman. This “lovely country, full of friendly people” charges a staggering $11.69 for a pint of Carlsberg at the Al Ghazal pub in the Intercontinental Hotel, a genuine affront to a price tag, so imagine how much an expensive drink would cost there.
The Middle East understandably stands high in the rankings, with the UAE coming in at $10.62, Qatar at $9.89, and Bahrain at $9.20, not too far behind. The Nordics are next up with Finland at $8.71 and Norway at $8.39, both charging big money.
Now it’s time for what you’ve been waiting for, the top five cheapest beers in the world, according to Worldwide Wilbur, and it’s an African trio to kick us off.
Togo comes in fifth at a staggering $0.80 per beer, with our intrepid hero grabbing an ice-cold bottle of Castel here. Then it’s Burundi, with this East African country coming in at $0.71, where, interestingly, the Safari Gate Hotel pool bar served up a 720ml bottle of Primus, making it technically the cheapest beer per millilitre. Rounding off our African trilogy in third place is Malawi and their $0.64 Kuche Kuche beer.
Ukraine and its $0.60 beer follows next, with a pint of the local brew costing next to nothing. Visited pre-Russian invasion, it feels like Worldwide Wilbur saw a Ukraine that no longer exists, one which saw “upscale clubs where oligarchs are buying thousand-dollar bottles of Cristal. And you can find back-alley bars where broke students are buying draft beer for just 60 cents!”
Then, finally, the cheapest beer in the world, and of course, it’s Vietnam, at a wallet-friendly $0.43. In Nha Trang, he grabbed a can of Tiger and drank it, sitting on “little plastic kids chairs that started to collapse each time I shifted [his] American-size frame”. He goes on to say that you can actually get cheaper beer there, the Bia Hoi that you will come across in Hanoi, but that, despite being $0.25, didn’t count because it’s only 3%. Now, as somebody who once paid £20 for a bottle of Magners in a hotel bar in Doha, it’s worth noting that these prices were obviously all taken at the time of drinking, meaning that some are outdated, but that isn’t what matters here.
This mission to find the cheapest beer in the world isn’t just about drinking that beautiful nectar; it’s about one bloke’s desire to do something great for mankind and answer an eternal question that has been whispered about in pubs for a hundred years. We are people born too late to be the first people to discover a new country or be the first person to walk on the moon, so this is all we have left to discover, and Worldwide Wilbur is breaking new ground.
