A Global Look at Leading and Emerging Brewing Countries
Sidebar: The China Question
It may come as a surprise that by a considerable margin the largest-selling beer in the world is one you may have never encountered or even have heard about. It is Snow, a Chinese beer that in 2013 sold more than 103 million hectoliters, or about twice the amount of Bud Light, No. 3 in the global beer sales rankings. No. 2, by the way, is also a Chinese beer, Tsingtao.
Such are the astounding beer demographics of the world’s largest country, where despite consuming a mere 36 or so liters per capita, beer production is by far the world’s highest, at an estimated 506.5 million hectoliters in 2013, more than the next three largest-producing countries combined.
It boils down to sheer numbers, of course. With a population of about 1.36 billion people, roughly 80 percent of whom are of legal drinking age—itself a malleable concept in a country that was without an age limit for alcohol consumption until 2006—it doesn’t take much individual beer drinking to raise the overall consumption numbers. Or, potentially, to rock the global beer market.
On that last point, consider this: If every Chinese adult drinks just 2 liters more ale or lager per year, that is 21.76 million more hectoliters of beer that must be produced annually, or 20 percent more than the entire production of the U.S. craft brewing segment in 2013.
Stephen Beaumont & Tim Webb
Stephen Beaumont and Tim Webb are veteran beer writers with over 60 years of experience between them. They are the authors of both The Pocket Beer Guide 2015 (Firefly Books, 2014) and The World Atlas of Beer (Sterling Epicure, 2012).