Brewing technical journals are a great source of them. I've spent many a happy hour collecting numbers from all sorts of trade journals in multiple languages. Though mostly in English or German. So I was delighted to be pointed in the direction of a Polish trade magazine by Gary Gillman, who wanted some help with a table heading.
A heading in the table below. The one for the last column, which shows hops usage in thousands of zentners (50 kg). I couldn't help posting about it, as it tells us quite a lot.
It doesn't surprise me that the UK and Ireland were the heaviest hoppers, with the latter topping the last. Why did Ireland come out so high? Because most of the beer brewed there was Stout. A beer which was both quite strong and heavily hopped. The UK average rate was double, and Ireland's triple, that of Continental Europe. That's a pretty big difference.
Between them, the UK and Ireland were using over 30% of the world's hops. Mightily impressive, but down from the late 19th century when the two countries consumed over 50% of the world's supply.
No shock either that Czechoslovakia led the pack in Continental Europe. Followed by other bits of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Elsewhere in the world, bits of another empire scored highly - the British Empire. With Australia & New Zealand just a little behind the UK. As was India. Which I can understand, what with the climate there. You'd want plenty of hops to prevent infection. I was a bit surprised at the high rate in Canada, which I would have expected to be more in line with the USA.
| Hops worldwide in 1935 | |||
| Country | beer production 1935 hl | hops gm/hl | hop usage in 1,000 zentner |
| Austria & Hungary | 2,484,000 | 260 | 12,917 |
| Balkans | 141,000 | 250 | 705 |
| Belgium & Luxembourg | 13,913,000 | 225 | 62,608 |
| Czechoslovakia | 7,748,000 | 300 | 46,488 |
| Denmark | 2,209,000 | 165 | 7,290 |
| France | 15,163,000 | 185 | 56,103 |
| Gdansk | 75,000 | 250 | 375 |
| Holland | 1,373,000 | 215 | 5,904 |
| Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland | 551,000 | 275 | 3,031 |
| Germany | 39,754,000 | 224 | 178,098 |
| Norway | 411,000 | 215 | 1,767 |
| Poland | 1,065,000 | 250 | 5,325 |
| Roumania and Yugoslavia | 666,000 | 300 | 3,996 |
| Russia * | 3,700,000 | 250 | 18,500 |
| Sweden | 2,530,000 | 165 | 8,349 |
| Switzerland | 2,315,000 | 200 | 9,260 |
| Italy, Spain & Portugal | 1,158,000 | 250 | 5,790 |
| Continent | 95,256,000 | 223.9 | 426,506 |
| Ireland | 3,092,000 | 750 | 46,380 |
| UK | 26,587,000 | 500 | 265,870 |
| Europa | 124,935,000 | 295.7 | 738,756 |
| Africa | 529,000 | 350 | 3,703 |
| Australia & New Zealand | 3,109,000 | 450 | 27,981 |
| Central America | 1,288,000 | 250 | 6,440 |
| South America | 3,929,000 | 250 | 19,645 |
| East Asia | 2,101,000 | 250 | 10,505 |
| India | 72,000 | 450 | 648 |
| Canada | 2,098,000 | 375 | 15,735 |
| USA | 53,076,000 | 255 | 270,688 |
| Total | 191,137,000 | 286.2 | 1,094,101 |
| * no specific consumption data available. | |||
| Source: | |||
| Przegląd Piwowarsko-Słodowniczy: organ Związku Piwowarów w Polsce 1936 wrzesień R.2 Nr3 | |||
| https://www.wbc.poznan.pl/dlibra/publication/401137/edition/314443/content | |||
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7 comments:
Great data sheet. What does "gm" in gm/hl means?
Chris,
gram.
I seem to be missing something in the calculation, but if a zentner is 50kg, isn't the result in kg/hl? Or is the last column converting from kg to g?
India was really high too.
I think of Indian beer today as fairly standard lagers, but it suggests that back then they mirrored English beer pretty closely.
Curious what country is the "Balkans". First thought was Yugoslavia, but then I saw if further down the list.
Dan has a point (no pun intended).
Working through the line for Germany:
39,754,000 HL × 224 g/L = 8904896000 g in total
Divide 8904896000 by 1000 to get kg => 8904896
Divide by 50 to get Zentner => 178097.92
Divide by 1000 again to get thousands of Zentner => 178.09792, so we are out by a magnitude of 1000.
I think what has happened is that Ron has, quite reasonably, translated the point separators in the original to commas. But the madman who typeset the original table in Polish has for some completely unknown reason used the point as a thousands separator in the first column and as a decimal separator in the third.
It is the only possible explanation because in the original we also have the figure for Gdansk, 0.375, and India, 0.648. Why would you write zero thousands? It has to be a decimal. But it's bizarre because the point isn’t usually the decimal separator in Polish.
Barm,
thanks for that. Other than the ones under 1,000, the last column is really just the number of zentners.
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