Saturday 20 July 2013

Number of breweries 1898 - 2000

Time for some more random statistics. Rather incomplete ones, but still of educational value.

First off, it's the number of breweries per country.What's most obvious is the huge number of breweries in Germany at the end of the 19th century. Those figures don't even cover the whole of Germany: Baden and Alsace-Lorraine are missing. All told, there must have been more than 20,000 breweries.

You can also see that time was crueller to Belgium and France in terms of brewery number reduction, while in the UK and Bavaria brewery numbers had been reduced by a factor of around 10, it was a factor of 30 for Belgium and 25 for France.

The USA has currently at around the same number as in 1900. The only major brewing nation where that's true.


Number of breweries 1898 - 2000
Country 1898 1899 1900 1998 1999 2000
UK 8,072 6,897 6,739 551 498 500
Brausteuergebiet 6,441
Bavaria 6,116 696 684 671
Wurtemburg 6,621 5,818 170 167 169
Belgium 3,143 3,118 3,223 112 113
Turkey 2 3
France 2,546 2,540 80 113
Russia 1,035 1,025
USA 2,390 2,412
total world 40,475 39,542
Sources:
Dundee Courier - Wednesday 13 September 1899, page 2.
Cheltenham Chronicle - Saturday 17 August 1901, page 7.
BBPA Statistical Handbook 2003, p. 92
The Beers of France
Het Brouwersblad June 2004. p.6
Deutscher Brauer-Bund, Bonn
Notes:
USA includes South America and Australia

I thought it would be interesting to look at average output per brewery. You can see that the breweries in the Brausteuergebiet - basically the North of Germany - operated on a larger scale than those in Bavaria and Württemberg.

But they still produced, on average, a third less than British breweries. To put the UK figures into context, around 4,700 of those breweries* were pub breweries making fewer than 1,000 barrels (1,600 hl) a year. Many of the breweries in Württemberg must have operated on a tiny scale.


Beer output and no. of breweries in 1900
output (hl) no. breweries output per brewery
Deutsches Zollgebiet 65,621,000
Brausteuergebiet 39,320,000 6,441 6,105
Bayern 17,739,000 6,116 2,900
Baden 3,095,000

Württemberg 4,128,000  5,818  710
Alsace-Lorraine 1,128,000
UK 60,724,628 6,739 9,011
Sources:
Brewers' Almanack 1928, p. 110
"Jahrbuch der Versuchs- und Lehranstalt für Brauerei in Berlin, 1911", p.585-589


* 1928 Brewers' Almanack, page 118.

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