Monday, April 5, 2021
Beer countries and wine countries
In the world of alcohol consumption there are beer drinkers, wine drinkers, and alcoholics. Some countries are considered to have mostly beer drinkers, and others have mostly wine drinkers. But how many countries are there of each?
In order to find out, I have had a look at the data for 2015, as contained in the Annual Database of Global Wine Markets, compiled by Anderson, Nelgen and Pinilla. Tables 41b (Volume of beverage wine consumption per adult) and 45b (Volume of beer consumption per adult) contain the information that we want.
Note that we need to standardize the data for each country, in order to deal with different population sizes and demographies (ie. we should compare consumption per adult), as well as standardizing for alcohol content, since wine has up to three times as much as beer (ie. we should compare liters of alcohol).