I think your brand manager might have been fudging the numbers a little bit.
as of 2019, there were ~1550 breweries in Germany. for Germany to account for 50% of the breweries in the world, there would need to be a maximum of ~3100 breweries in the world.
as of 2017, there were ~7450 breweries in the United States.
the link that I posted of ~10k breweries in the United States (elsewhere in thread) includes every location for those breweries, which accounts for an additional ~2500 entries.
those numbers definitely don't jive with Germany having 50% of the breweries in the world, especially given that a very large number of them in Germany are actually client brewers (like a virtual brewery that is just a "brand" that has real breweries brewing their beer).
First it happend to be about 15 years ago. Still when there was the big boom of microbreweries in the US.
Don't remeber the exact numbers it was something like 8.000 worldwiede. 4.000 in Germany and 2.000 in Franconia.
Never verfied that.
Currentl, just living in an old country house that was used for hops and the region is very well known for hops. The neihgboring city has his own brewery, which is not in the data. It's not a new one. It is here for more than 50 years.
> First it happend to be about 15 years ago. Still when there was the big boom of microbreweries in the US.
even 15 years ago, it would in no way been true, while we've added quite a few breweries in the last decade, we've also lost quite a few due to a mix of attrition and consolidation. so, the number likely even out to about the same.
as noted, a large portion (maybe 45%) of those in Germany are really virtual breweries, so that skews the numbers quite a bit. PBR is an example in the US (since 1999).
> Currentl, just living in an old country house that was used for hops and the region is very well known for hops.
awesome! I personally am always on the lookout for interesting hops! if you happen to have some interesting varietals, I'd happily take them off your hands in trade for some home-brew or one of the interesting breweries that I've worked with in the Portland area :)
> The neihgboring city has his own brewery, which is not in the data. It's not a new one. It is here for more than 50 years.
yeah, the data is ... not very good. the list I posted with 7500 is a big step up, but only includes the US. I really need to see if DigitalPour will do an export of their brewery list, and see if it can help add to a public brewery data source. there are so many great lists, but most of them are private.
Thanks for suggesting the topic. I was interested in these numbers from more reliable sources. Apparently, a very detailed statistics is available in the BarthHaas Report (https://www.barthhaas.com/downloads/berichte-broschueren)
Here is a approximate bier production per year for comparison:
World's total: 200.000.000.000 liter = 200 Gl
Germany: 9.000.000.000 liter = 9 Gl (5th place; try to guess the leaders. We are talking about quantity, not quality)
Radeberger Group: 1.000.000.000 liter = 1 Gl
Bavaria: 2.300.000.000 ~ 2 Gl (terribly sorry, I didn't find Frankonia separately :) But for the region's defense I should say that excellent report comes from Nürnberg.
Data for years 2019-2020.
There is even Top 40 breweries in the world in there.
Beer from the smaler microbreweries tastes much better than the one from those big ones.
Just to do put in relation, if there is one big brewery in Mexico who produces for the whole area, like Dos Excuies, its much more than a local one right next to me.
That time I learned that about 50% of the worldwide breweries are from Germany. Within Germany about 50% of the breweries are based in Franconia.
You should not mixup brands and breweries. Because there a big breweries, which own a lot of different brands.
So what I see from this database a lot of data from Franconian breweries is missing and other data is just wrong.