I ranked all UK Wetherspoon pubs by where £10 gets you the most drunk
by Oliver Clegg
Figures as of this date.
I pulled the drinks menu for every Wetherspoons I could find, 743 of them, and asked the same question of each one: if you walk in with a tenner and spend it as cleverly as possible, how drunk do you leave? For most of the country the answer turns out to be five pints of Stowford Press, and I'll get to why. If you'd rather skip the stats and just see where your local came, go to the table. It's at the bottom and you can search it.
How many pubs land on each total
- 43812.785
- 3713.636
- 3110.228
- 2314.772
- 2213.069
- 1713.551
- 1312.926
- 913.494
- 811.080
- 88.278
- 75.720
- 613.296
438 pubs print the same line: 5 × Stowford Press Apple cider (Pint).
438 pubs, 60 percent of the ranked list, give you exactly the same receipt. Five pints of Stowford Press Apple at £1.99 each, £9.95 all in, 12.785 units. You get 5p change, which buys nothing, which is why the chart above has one enormous bar. Once a pint of cider costs £1.99 there isn't really a decision left to make. The maths has looked at the rest of the menu and politely declined.
I'll be honest, I went in expecting a north/south story, or at least a "Spoons is cheap" story, and it's neither. It's one product at one price doing the heavy lifting for most of Britain. The other 40 percent is where it gets interesting.
Mean units for £10
Airports are grim. Eight of them made the ranking and they average 5.51 units for your tenner, mostly because the cheap cider isn't on the menu and what's left is priced like you've already cleared security, which, to be fair, you have. Star Light in Heathrow Terminal 4 props up the whole table: 4.057 units for the full £10. You could get more drunk on the flight.
London zone 1/2 is a shallower hole at 9.45 units on average across 36 pubs. A word on why I've cut it that way, because it looks a bit arbitrary. Zones 1 and 2 are what most people mean when they say "let's go to London" for the day. That's central London as a normal person understands it, so that's the boundary. A pub only counts if it's actually inside those zones. Within them it's mixed: Brockley still has the £1.99 Stowford, Westminster very much does not.
The rest of the country is boringly similar once you take the airports and central London out. Wales averages 13.01 units, the rest of England 12.81, Ireland 12.65, Scotland 12.35. The gaps between countries are a rounding error next to the gap between a normal Spoons and one with a departures board.
Units for £10
Mean Carling pint £3.19, across 693 menus.
Carling is the trap at the other end. People order it because they know what it is, and I get that. But at a mean pint price of £3.19 across 693 menus, a tenner of Carling gets you about 6.3 units. Spend the same tenner the way this ranking does and you get 12.54. Roughly double. You're not paying extra for a better drink, you're paying for the reassurance of a word you recognise on the pump.
The overall winner is The Jolie Brise in Teignmouth: 15.739 units for £9.96, made up of three pints of Sandford Orchards The General and a third of a pint of Broadoak Moonshine. The top of the board tends to look like that. Strong local cider, a menu with a few odd measures on it, and nobody having tidied it up for tourists.
A little further down, 23 pubs share the same total of 14.772 units on four pints of Greene King Abbot Reserve. I've used competition ranking throughout, so if three pubs tie for 2nd the next one down is 4th. That's what the equals signs in the table mean.
One more way of looking at it. The NHS suggests keeping to 14 units a week, and I'm not going to argue with them. At the best density on this board, that week costs £8.86 in Teignmouth. At the median pub it's £10.90. In London zone 1/2 it's around £15.18, at the airports £25.69, and at Star Light it's £34.51, which is what happens when the national cider price list doesn't make it through security.
Method
The question was where £10 gets you the most drunk. I've measured "drunk" in UK alcohol units, because ABV and measure are the only two things every menu agrees on, and units are just those two multiplied together. The menus are live Wetherspoon prices, pulled every day. For each pub I worked out the exact combination of drinks that gets you the most units for £10 or less, allowing repeats, so five of the same pint is a legitimate answer. If you're the sort of person who wants to know, it's an unbounded knapsack over spend in pence. If you aren't, it's just the best round for a tenner.
The planner on the site does the same thing, but with manners: it caps you at 14 units a round and lets you rule out things you don't drink. I've taken both of those off for the ranking, because with them on, Teignmouth wouldn't be allowed to win inside the very tool that found it.
Try it yourself if you want the version with the cap on. Find your own pub in the table below. The live board has the current standings. This page is frozen at 30 August 2026, so if a guest ale moves, the joke here stays and the board doesn't.
SpoonMe is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to J D Wetherspoon plc.
The table
This list uses figures correct as of 30 August 2026. If you are visiting this page from a future date and want to see what the leaderboard currently looks like, refer to the live board.
Open a pub for its £10 receipt.
727 pubs
Sixteen pubs are missing
Fourteen of them never returned a menu, including the one in Spain. The other two came back with an empty drinks list: The Sir Walter Scott, airside at Edinburgh, and The Sir John Hawkshaw at Cannon Street. If yours is one of them, it's not personal.