The price of beer in Northern Ireland has always perplexed me.

Most of the bars are tied to Guinness and I would imagine there is some minimum pricing going on.

From personal experience, a pint of Guinness in a Guinness house is about 4.50.

Guinness/Diageo further stifle publicans by placing restrictions on what landlords can get in on draft. Which is a pain for the burgeoning Micro breweries. They could always sell their stuff in bottles or cans but the only bottling plant in Ireland is-you guessed it- owned by Diageo, and is prohibitively expensive. So, a lot of the bottling is done by hand, is labour intensive and reduces the brewers margins.

So what the consumer has to deal with is inflated prices and less choice,
The landlord is restricted on getting cheaper alternatives and offering less choice and the brewers can’t enjoy the fruits of their labours.

More details on the findings here