Belgian brewing 1929 - 1935

I'm sticking with my favourite Polish trade magazine, Which is certainly delivering in terms of numbers. Lovely, tempting numbers. Drawing me away from what I should really be doing, the seductive little devils.

As you should have guessed from the title, these statistics are for Belgian brewing. Let's see what they tell us.

Belgium had a shitload of breweries between the wars. 1,631 might sound impressive, but that's way down on before WW I. Back then there were more than 3,300. It was the war that did for many of them. The Germans knicked most copper vessels to make munitions and many small breweries simply never reopened. I guess many didn't have the capital to replace the equipment.

The effect of the Wall Street Crash and the recession which followed it is clear to read in the production figures. With a steep decline after 1931. A drop in sales seems to have reversed the trend in output per brewery increasing. An average of around 10,000 hl is very low. If you look in the second table, you'll see that in the UK the average was almost treble that.

The trends in the UK were very similar to in Belgium - really bad sales in 1932 and 1933, with a slight improvement in 1934. You can see that a high percentage of the beer imported into Belgium came from the UK.

Belgian brewing 1929 - 1935
year	number of breweries	production in 1000 hl.	imports 1000 hl.	exports 1000 hl.	consumption in 1000 hl.	output per brewery hl
1929	1,631	15,377	196	19	15,553	9,536
1930	1,556	16,662	228	10	16,880	10,848
1931	1,494	18,377	212	10	18,579	12,436
1932	1,484	15,558	156	8	15,707	10,584
1933	1,457	14,667	113	6	14,774	10,140
1934	1,372	14,717	95	5	14,806	10,792
1935			92	7
Source:
Przegląd Piwowarsko-Słodowniczy: organ Związku Piwowarów w Polsce 1936 wrzesień R.2 Nr3, page 67.

UK brewing 1930 - 1935
year	number of breweries	production hl.	output per brewery hl	exports to Belgium hl
1930	1,418	41,015,395	28,925	129,841
1931		39,113,784		134,414
1932	1,286	34,025,411	26,458	106,884
1933		29,376,748		85,428
1934	1,197	33,029,558	27,594	60,270
1935	1,144	34,146,520	29,848	58,203
Sources:
Brewers' Almanack 1955 p.68
Brewers' Almanack 1955, p. 50
BBPA Statistical Handbook 2003, p. 92
Brewers' Almanack 1955, page 57.