Saturday 1 May 2010

German breweries per state in 1865

Guess what? More 19th-century statistics. And I remembered it was German month. Not Austro-Hungarian month. That's May. Or is May Mild Month? I get confused.

A fascinating table today. Showing wonderfully the fragmentation of Germany on the eve of unification. And how much the density of breweries varied.


Number of breweries per German state in 1865
no. breweries male workers workers per brewery population pop per brewery
Prussia 6,817 11,026 1.62 21,793,900 3,197
Hannover 454 638 1.41 1,854,700 4,085
Kurhessen 332 402 1.21 738,500 2,224
Nassau 165 182 1.10 1,389,000 8,418
Hessen-Homburg 21 28 1.33 27,400 1,305
Frankfurt am Main 97 379 3.91 87,500 902
subtotal 7,886 12,655 1.60 25,891,000 3,283
Königreich Sachsen 619 1,324 2.14 1,916,700 3,096
Oldenburg 149 124 0.83 314,300 2,109
Braunschweig 90 189 2.10 292,700 3,252
Anhalt 77 120 1.56 193,000 2,506
Sachsen-Weimar 225 303 1.35 280,200 1,245
Sachsen-Coburg-Gotha 272 131 0.48 164,500 605
Sachsen-Meiningen 419 311 0.74 177,800 424
Sachsen-Altenburg 165 139 0.84 141,800 859
Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt 109 123 1.13 73,800 677
Schwarzburg-Sonderhausen 69 94 1.36 66,200 959
Reuss, jüngere Linie 94 106 1.13 86,500 920
Reuss, ältere Linie 61 79 1.30 43,900 720
Schaumburg-Lippe 31,400
Lippe-Detmold 27 47 1.74 111,300 4,122
Waldeck 25 34 1.36 59,100 2,364
Grossherztogthum Hessen Oberhessen 352 103 0.29 252,400 717
Grossherztogthum Hessen Unterhessen 289 409 1.42 564,500 1,953
Baden 859 1,306 1.52 1,369,300 1,594
Württemberg 2,026 3,313 1.64 1,748,300 863
Bavaria 5,385 9,727 1.81 4,774,600 887
Luxemburg 36 87 2.42 203,700 5,658
Total 19,234 30,724 1.60 38,757,000 2,015
Sources:
“Bericht über der Welt Ausstellung zu Paris im Jahre 1867, volume 7”, 1868, page 133.
http://www.populstat.info/

I find a couple of things amusing. Like Württemberg having more breweries per head of population than Bavaria. Or the most heavily-breweried states - Sachsen-Coburg-Gotha, Sachsen-Meiningen, Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt - all being in Thüringen (despite the Sachsen in two of their names.

419 breweries for 177,000 people. That's crazy. And it shows how far the USA has to go before being saturated with breweries. At least by 19th-century, central European standards.

In case you've forgotten, (and if your memory is as bad as mine you surely will have) in the same year Austria-Hungary had 3,138 breweries at a rate of one per 11,256 inhabitants. Or quite a way behind Germany. Today the situation is reversed, with Austria having more breweries per head than Germany. (Austria has 170 breweries at a rate of one per 48,087 inhabitants. Germany has 1,259 breweries at a rate of one per 66,468 inhabitants. I include the numbers as I assume many of you aren't sufficiently motivated to follow that link.)

I'm starting to enjoy these old stats. That's a threat.

3 comments:

Rob Sterowski said...

Is the workers per brewery column the number of people working in the brewery? That seems crazy low.

Martyn Cornell said...

Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, of course, was Prince Albert's lot. The "Sachsen" in the name comes from the wacky dynastic slicing-and-dicing that went on in pre-unification Germany. According to Wikipedia, Saxe-Gotha became part of Thuringia after WWI, but Saxe-Coburg went into Bavaria. Counting all those little Saxe duchies, the current German Lands and the various English counties/kingdoms past and present (Middlesex, Essex, Sussex, Wessex) have any people ever had more polities named after them than the Saxons?

Fortissimo said...

I love the statistics! Very interesting. Of course, if you wanted to be real geeky - assuming the statistics exist - you should see how many breweries existed in the German states in, say, 1765...prior to the Napoleonic Wars. "Germany" at that time consisted of nearly 1,000 states, principalities, dukedoms, kingdom, etc. I'm sure that would be a nightmare undertaking to try and tally!