Saturday 21 July 2007

Consuption (3)

Life's full of coincidences. The latest edition of Brauwelt arrived today and guess what it contained? Details of the consumption of alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks in Germany. As I doubt many of you subscribe to Brauwelt, I thought I would share the information with you.



You should bear in mind that the spirits figure are bulk and not converted to the equivalent amount of 100% alcohol like the UK figures. To compare like with like the German figures need to be divided by 3.

Let's make a comparison with the UK (for the year 2002).

Beer: UK 100.6 litres; Germany 121.9
Wine: UK 19.6 litres, Germany 24.2
Spirits: UK 1.7 litres, Germany 1.9 (adjusted as mentioned above)

See, the British aren't quite as big a bunch of drunks as everyone assumes. I am surprised how close the figures for wine consumption are. I would have guessed a much bigger lead for Germany, a major wine producer.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I've read before many times that the Germans have a higher per capita intake of alcohol than anyone else in Europe.

I wonder whether there is a big difference in the older generations attitude to booze between Germany and other countries. Certainly it does not seem uncommon to see large groups of elderly people knocking back half-litres and even litres in Germany. You certainly don't see elderly women chugging pints in the UK in the same way!

Given that Germany also has one of the highest percentage of OAPs in Europe (if not the highest?) this may account for a significant amount of the consumption.

Ron Pattinson said...

I'm not sure which country has the largest consumption of alcohol.

Drinking - especially beer drinking - is spread over a much wider percentage of the population in Germany. It's normal for people of all ages and sexes toi drink beer.

It's the young who sren't really committed to beer. They prefer trendy mixed drinks or cocktails.