UK hop usage 1934 - 1953

Except the war years are missed out. For a good reason. They didn't appear in one of the tables I'm basing this on.

I spend a lot of my day looking at numbers. Sometimes they provoke me to write a few words. As in this case. I'd been harvesting various statistics about barley and hops from the Brewers' Almanack, one of my all-time favourite books. When I was busy with those for world hop production something struck me. A fact I thought was worth passing on.

I noticed it because recently I'd been messing with the figures for UK hop imports nad hop usage. The quantity of hops used in the UK was still fresh in my mind. And easy to recall because it hovered around a quarter of a million cwt. for a long tiime in the middle of the 20th century.

To be honest, I was quite surprised how high up the league table of hop producers Britain came: number 2 pre-WW II, after the USA. Down to number 3 after WW II, but pretty much neck and neck with Germany.

Combining the world production with UK usage highlighted a fascinating fact: the UK used a considerable percentage of the world's hops.

UK hop usage 1934 - 1953
year	cwt hops	world production	% used in UK
1934	248,744
1935	258,300
1937	270,692
1937	277,846
1938	286,716
average 1934-38	268,460	1,173,302	22.88%
1951	228,512	1,379,251	16.57%
1952	225,569	1,272,678	17.72%
1953	216,841	1,182,653	18.34%
Sources:
1955 Brewers'Almanack, page 63
1955 Brewers' Almanack, page 65.

As you can see, immediately before WW II, the UK used almost 23% of the world production of hops. I was surprised that it was so high.  Even after WW II it was around 18%.

Knowing how much British hop usage fell after WW I - 1905 to 1914 an average of 560,549 cwts were used each year in the UK* - I can only assume that the percentage of the world crop consumed in Britain was much higher. Possibly as much as 50%. I need to find the figures for world hop production for the early years of the 20th century.

Here's the table of world hop production. The vast majority came from the four largest producers: USA, UK, Germany and Czechoslovakia.

Hops: World Production
Country	Annual Averages
	1934-38	1945-1949	1951	1952	1953
	cwts.	cwts.	cwts.	cwts.	cwts.
Northern Hemisphere
USA	348,009	465,455	564,634	546,991	372,786
Canada	14,393	19,170	17,339	17,920	15,179§
United Kingdom	250,205	275,768	321,821	282,348	266,000
Czechoslovakia	191,625§	90,393	98,420§	80,705§	98,420§
Germany	178,866	76,143	252,795	206,187	280,500
France	44,071	24,161	41,330	34,446	48,223
Belgium	23,741	13,527	19,366	17,062	19,179
Spain	—	t	t	2,607	3,661
Poland	34,884	t	t	t	t
Yugoslavia	35,509	25,179	24,652	23,652	25,589
Other European	2,643	t	t	t	t
USSR	19,687	t	t	t	t
Japan	1,286	2,196	9,054	16,241	13,286
Total	1,144,919	991,992	1,349,411	1,228,159	1,142,823
Southern Hemisphere*
Australia	20,571	21,348	18,384	31,920	28,000§
New Zealand	7,812	7,107	7,795	8,036	7,589§
Union of South Africa	t	2,018	2,482	3,384	3,125§
Argentina	t	768	1,179	1,179	1,116§
Total	28,383	31,241	29,840	44,519	39,830§
World Total	1,173,302	1,023,233	1,379,251	1,272,678	1,182,653§
* crops harvested early in the following year
t not available
§ estimate
Source:
1955 Brewers' Almanack, page 65.

* 1928 Brewers' Almanack, page 120.