The season for Christmas markets is now upon us. Hundreds of wooden huts are erected across the country, selling vats of steaming glühwein and mountains of bratwurst.
The cost-of-living crisis has also exacerbated public feelings towards food pricing. Inflation, which hit a 41-year high last month, means rising costs across the board, however, is it ever OK to charge £7 for a hotdog?
Manchester Evening News writer Dianne Bourne visited the city's popular markets to see how much the food cost. And there's been a steep increase compared to previous years - here's her breakdown of how much some of the most popular foods cost.
To give you an idea of the overall price increases, ever-popular sausages like bratwurst and cheese sausage are up from £5 to £6.50 at many of the Christmas markets' most popular German stalls this year. Meanwhile, currywurst now comes in at £7 and you're looking at 50p extra if you want onions.
Pints have gone up to an average of £6 this year, from £5 - £5.50 last year, and you're looking at paying around 50p - £1 more for your glühwein too at £5 - £5.50 across the stalls. And don't forget you'll need to factor in a £2 deposit for a pint pot or £3 for a Christmas mug, which you'll get back if you return the receptacle afterwards.
I headed down to the Manchester Christmas Markets on Sunday to see what the sausage and beer is like for my money and whether it's worth the extra pennies we're having to invest on a festive treat at the event this year. If you're wondering if the price hikes have put everyone off their sausages for the 2022 return, then that's a big fat no - just look at the crowds.
Sausage munchers were everywhere on my Sunday visit. I mean literally at every turn. The scent of sizzling onions and chargrilled sausage hangs heavy in the Manchester air right now and infiltrates your nostrils.
It is clearly sending some crazy sensory signal to the human body that makes a sausage supremely hard to resist for anyone walking around town. You cannot walk down St Ann's Square without witnessing the shovelling of buns into hungry little mouths, young and old, juggling as they do their shopping bags while balancing their bangers.
And in fairness, everyone is looking pretty happy about it all too. I decide to head to perhaps the most famous of all the sausage stalls on the market - The Witch House on New Cathedral Street - for my taste test.
It's the big boy and it knows it, proudly hanging its giant plastic recreations of bratwurst like meaty torpedos atop the wooden huts. As I approach the counter I say hello to the lady on the till and she responds with "bratwurst, cheese sausage, smoked sausage, currywurst" in a way someone only can when they've been asked the same question roughly 500 times already over the past 48 hours.
I plump for the classic bratwurst and decide to invest the 50p extra in some onions, with a squidge of ketchup on top. Grabbing hold of it tightly, I head into the adjacent wooden Almhutte to grab myself a beer too, but here's where I get a bit confused.
I'm not all that keen on beer, and so a beer expert pal has advised me that I should give the lighter Bavarian wheat beer a try. I spot it on the menu priced at £11 and I assume that must be the one I need to try.
But of course, that's the price for one of those giant litre stein glasses. Gulp.
I then get the news from the bartender that the deposit for the special stein glass is another £7. Now, I know you get it back, but that means my total investment here for sausage (£7), litre of beer (£11) and stein glass (£7) racked up to £25.
I was getting a bit twitchy by this stage at the amount of money I'd just shelled out. That is, of course, until I gave that massive jug of beer a little sip.
Because it genuinely couldn't have been nicer than if it was an entire bottle of champagne poured into it, it really couldn't. And as for the sausage?
Well, I was honestly surprised by just how delicious it tasted. The bun was soft and squidgy, providing the perfect cushion for its large meaty crunch.
I wish I hadn't shelled out the extra 50p for the onions though as I felt the sausage didn't really need them at all as it was much tastier without them. But overall, I felt like the size and taste of the sausage made it pretty much worth the £6.50.
A pint (rather than the litre) of the Bavarian beer would have cost £6. Honestly I think I preferred it to my usual tipple of prosecco which would cost me £6 - 6.50 for a glass half the size of the beer around the Christmas Markets stalls.
Incredibly, this all started to seem like good value. Or, at least, I didn't feel like I was "ripped off".
Mostly, I just felt happy at having some pleasant hot food and a nice drink in a quirky wooden hut which made me feel a bit festive. Can, or should, happiness really be found at the bottom of a litre jug of beer and at the end of a tasty ketchup-clad sausage?
Probably not, but you take your moments of joy where you can these days don't you? And in the seriously doom and gloom 2022 we're collectively enduring I think we're all just looking for a bit of festive fun every now and again - and I definitely found it on my little trip out here.
