How Can Home Bargains Sell Love Lane Black Bird Extra Stout for Just £1.49?
Home Bargains. £1.49. 440ml. 6.7% ABV Black Bird Extra Stout.
That price alone already felt wrong. Not in a bad way, just in a “how does this exist?” way. A stout pushing 7% usually lives in a bottle shop fridge with a £4.50 to £6 price tag and a bit of ceremony around it. This didn’t. It was sat there quietly, next to chocolate bars and washing-up liquid (it didn't actually, it was next to some very cheap looking vodka!).
And yet, once it was in the glass, it stopped being a novelty and started being a very good stout.
Black Bird pours dark and inviting, with a proper tan head and that reassuring look that says this isn’t going to be thin or watery. The aroma is straight down the line. Roasted malt, coffee, and a little hint of dark chocolate ... nothing out of place.
The flavour is where it really surprised me. Big roast up front, proper coffee bitterness (very espresso like), a little dark chocolate richness, and a lovely smoky edge running through the middle. There’s also a subtle liquorice note that adds depth rather than sweetness. The finish is dry, bitter, and confident. Full-bodied, warming, and exactly what you want from a strong stout.
At no point does it taste cheap. That’s the key thing.
No harsh alcohol. No odd sweetness. No sense that something has been thrown in to bulk it out or mask a thin base (I checked the ingredients panel - water, roasted barley, malted barley, oats, wheat, yeast and hops) they've also thrown some vanilla pods in there for a sweet, creamy feel to it too (note I said vanilla pods, not extracts, or sugars or flavourings). This feels like a straight-up, traditional extra stout brewed with some real intent to please the drinker.
Which brings us to the real reason this beer is interesting.
How is a stout like this being sold for £1.49?
Love Lane Brewery is now owned by White Real Estate Limited, a company associated with Tom Morris, the founder and owner of Home Bargain. That connection matters, and it needs saying early, but it doesn’t magically explain everything away. A brewery still has to brew beer properly. Malt, hops, yeast, energy, staff, packaging, duty. None of that is free.
So rather than pretending to know the exact figures, it’s more useful to think about how this might work in practice.
At scale, ingredient costs drop sharply. Buying malt and hops in serious volume is a different world to what it costs me from some of my favourite home brew suppliers. Brewing in-house removes distributor margins completely. There’s no sales team pushing this beer out to bars, no wholesaler cut, and no bottle shop markup.
Packaging is simple. One can size. No marketing campaign. No limited edition hype.
If you put all that together, it’s reasonable to assume that a 440ml can of a 6.7% stout could be brewed somewhere around the 30p to 45p mark at scale. That’s not insider knowledge, just informed common sense based on how big operations and breweries work.
That still leaves duty and VAT, of course, but even then, this beer doesn’t need to carry big margins on its own ... because that’s not its job.
Black Bird isn’t there to be a hero profit line inside Home Bargains. It’s there to get you through the door. It’s a basket beer.
You go in for a £1.49 stout, and while you’re there, you pick up other bits. Snacks. Household stuff. Maybe another couple of beers (well I did!). That’s where the money is made. The stout just needs to be good enough that you remember it, talk about it ( I can't stop talking about it), and come back.
And this one absolutely is.
What’s interesting is that this doesn’t feel like a cynical product. It doesn’t feel like corners have been cut. It feels like scale has been used properly.
For drinkers, that’s a win. You get access to a strong, flavourful stout at a price that used to be reserved for bland 4% cans if dishwater pale ales. For Home Bargains, it reinforces the idea that you might find genuinely good beer there, not just cheap beer.
Beers like Black Bird do shift expectations. Once you’ve had a clean, roasty, 6.7% stout for £1.49, it’s harder to justify paying £5 for something that doesn’t taste any better. That doesn’t make Black Bird a threat. It just makes it a benchmark.
The final thing worth saying is this. I don’t think this is a “good for the money” beer. That phrase always sounds like faint praise, and vastly under sells this alcohol delight.
This is just a ruddy good stout. The fact it happens to be cheap is the interesting bit, not the defining one. It’s the sort of beer you can come back to without overthinking it, and each time, you’re still quietly impressed that it exists at all. And I have gone back to it, bought a fair few of them, ready for the weekend.
One thing does worry me about this beer ... it says SPECIAL RELEASE on the can, and I just hope that doesn't mean we have to enjoy this now, because its no longer in production! I for one would happily pay twice the £1.49 asking price for this stout.
Final Thought: If this is what budget supermarket stout can look like in 2026, then that’s a very good place to be.
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