Whats With the Beer Drinking

The German office that does official statistics for the country.....went out and did up a survey and poll over beer drinking in Germany.  The surprising results?  We are at the lowest point in twenty years....for consumption of beer in Germany.

There was barely two billion liters of beer consumed in the first quarter of 2013.

According to Bloomberg News, the average German adult consumes roughly 106 1-liter bottles of beer per year.  This comes out to roughly two beers a week.  Course, you have to figure in that most German women prefer a wine, or wine-mix....so guys are likely drinking their two beers.  And you can figure that twenty percent of German men don't consume any alcohol much at all, so we are up to six beers a week per German guy.

When you walk around a grocery or beverage shop....you tend to notice an awful lot of various alcohol  wine, beer, and odd-ball substances to consume.  You might admit that you've never seen so many possibilities.

In a typical grocery walk, you probably will notice at least seventy different beers now sold by major grocery operations, with at least ten non-alcohol beers offered.  Groceries even offer Dutch and Belgium beers.  Even British ales are offered in most German groceries now.  For wine?  There's likely to be at least one hundred choices....maybe as many as one-hundred-fifty choices.

Adding to this....the heavy hand of DWI pains.  In the 1960s...on the way home, you'd stop....have four German beers, and somehow make it safely home.  Today?  A cop stops you and you've lost your license for a year.  There's a bit of fear in drinking today.  Most guys either drink in home, or at the corner pub.  Rarely do you see a couple of German guys stop after work to drink two beers and chat for hour.

All this leads me to this belief that in twenty years....Germans will be barely drinking one beer a week on average.  I won't say it's a good thing or bad thing....but society is changing their habits.  Some brewery operations will cease to exist.  Beer, for the most part, is in transition.