Dr Johnson in his dictionary defines “excise”: -

                 A hateful tax levied on commodities, and adjudged not by the common judges of property, but wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid

                 There is no single market, no level playing field for the brewers of Europe. Each country in Europe has a different method of calculating duty, with the effect of hindering trade between countries and distorting the market for different strengths of the product. For instance, on 1 January 1993, the day when it became law in each country that the strength of beer (in Alcohol by Volume) be shown on the beer label, The Netherlands changed the basis of excise calculation from ABV to “degrees Plato” – a measure of original gravity. That certainly did not make calculating Dutch duty any easier!

                 Britain uses a simple calculation for beer duty, currently: -

                                 £0.1189 per litre multiplied by the ABV of the beer.

                 Which means: -

A litre of beer of 1% ABV = 11.89 pence duty

A litre of beer of 6% ABV  = 71 pence duty, and

A litre of beer of 10% ABV = £1.18 duty

                 However a litre of 6% or 10% beer in Holland would cost as equivalent 18p.

That is 49p – 93p less tax per litre than here in the UK.

Unlike Britain, most European countries apply beer duty in steps. In Holland the highest duty rate is applied to beer of 6% and above.

Two effects can be observed: -

For a normal 4% beer there is an enormous tax difference of 11 pence in Holland and 47 pence in the UK. For higher strength beers, Britain's system punishes the consumer to an exponentially increasing extent, meaning that the final price of Thomas Hardy’s Ale (12% ABV) is (was) roughly 25% excise duty, while for Heineken (brewed in the UK by Whitbread at 3.4% ABV) it is about 6%.

This feature of the UK tax system is probably the reason that British ale tends to be brewed to lower strengths than in the past, and in comparison to other countries. It is certainly this reason that means that UK imitations of foreign beers like Castlemaine XXXX, Heineken, Oranjeboom, Fosters, Carlsberg…are brewed weaker than the original beers.

And this is certainly the reason that the Barley Wines for which Britain was so famous are almost all now dead and gone. The duty including VAT on a single bottle of Thomas Hardy ale was 55p. This sort of beer took a long time to ferment and mature, not to mention a whole lot of high quality, expensive ingredients. Beers of this strength and quality survive perfectly easily abroad. It is hard not to conclude that the way UK duty is calculated did not kill this beer.