KZBlog

Almost every article on Kazakhstan in the world press begins with some reference to Borat and then continues on to discuss whether the latest news enhances or diminishes the reputation of Kazakhstan. But here is a piece of news that can be taken either way. I call it a piece of news, but in fact it is a highly useful scientific study. But like all research, not without controversy.

The Sun reported a few weeks ago that Kazakhstan’s beer is among the top ten cheapest in the world. However, when I went to the site of the academic institution that carried out this study, Kazakhstan was not on the list of cheapest countries. However, looking at Kazakhstan’s page I see that there seems to be some confusion on prices between buying a beer in a restaurant and buying it at the store. Beer in the store averages around 100 tenge in Astana these days (0r 0.4 pounds) which would put it between Rwanda and the Philippines in 8th place. Also, when you look at this list, you have North Korea, Bhutan, Tajikistan. Really, Panama, the Philippines, and Kazakhstan are the only tourist friendly and accessible countries on the list. So reasonably speaking, Kazakhstan is the second cheapest place that you could or would actually go to buy beer in the world.

In other beer news, the best beer in the world appears to no longer exist. The Tyan Shyan brewery is only producing light beer as best I can tell. Still good. But not the same.

UPDATE: It looks like the Pintprice website is constantly being updated by users and automatically recalculates its top ten lists. So that explains why Kazakhstan was on the list a few weeks ago, and is now off the list.