Sunday 19 September 2021

More Dutch numbers

Amazing how much bollocks, sorry, highly informative posts, I can spin out of a single page of a source. Yes, I'm returning to that CBK document because I hadn't totally milked it dry. 

I'll bully off with some translated bullet points:

"3) Position in the world ranking:
After the war, with the exception of 1957, the Netherlands has always been the world's largest beer exporter. In 1961, Germany ousted the Netherlands from first place.

4) The Netherlands' share in world beer exports is approximately 20%. Every 5th glass of imported beer anywhere in the world is therefore of Dutch origin.

5) Number of countries (according to CBS classification) to which Dutch beer is exported in 1961: 143.

6) 1961 foreign exchange proceeds approximately 73 million guilders. (For comparison, distilled exports yielded 28,200,000 in 1961)."
Holland en Bier held at the Amsterdamse Stadsarchief, document number 31121 1139, page 1.

Wondering what points 1 and 2 were? Then go and look at the effing document yourself, you nosey bastard. I'm not going to do everything for you. It'll just encourage you not to bother.

As I'm a nice bloke, here's bullet point 8 in table form:

Beer exports in 1961
country hl
Germany 965,000
Denmark 696,000
Holland 865,583
UK 407,000
Source:
Holland en Bier held at the Amsterdamse Stadsarchief, document number 31121 1139, page 1.

Holland, despite its modest size was one of the big players in the beer export game. And still is. Perhaps that was prompted by the limited opportunities in the domestic market. Despite appearing to be a typical country in the North European beer-drinking belt, for most of the 20th century Holland wasn't. As the consumption per capita clearly shows:

Consumption per capita
year litres
1938 14.9
1950 10.6
1955 16.2
1960 23.8
1961 26.4
Source:
Holland en Bier held at the Amsterdamse Stadsarchief, document number 31121 1139, page 1.

That's Italian levels of consumption. Proper beer-drinking countries put away 100 litres plus per head a year. Though, to be fair, that had increased to over 80 litres by the 1990s

 



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