I think the mistake is seeing the beer to watch ratio and assuming that beers are hard to afford now. One primary reason beer in a pub is expensive is because of cost of labor scaling badly in the pub but extremely well for the watch. It's Baumol Cost Disease. The beer only costs more because the other work the pub staff is doing could be more productive now elsewhere. So in the end of the day, unless you are an alcoholic, you can likely afford more beers just because everything else has gotten so much cheaper.

One caveat I want to call out though is of course the skyrocketing housing cost which also impact rent (or opportunity cost of they own) for the pub and thus the beer price as well. This is where I really don't understand how NIMBYs continue to get their way.