Beer volumes by market

Recurring, free beer-volume data for Carlsberg's markets, pulled from national statistics offices and Eurostat. Everything here is monthly except Norway, which is quarterly.

Read the labels before reading the lines. Five different things are collected here and they are not interchangeable: hectolitres brewed, a production volume index, duty-paid sales, a hospitality volume index and hospitality turnover. Only Germany, France, Poland, China and Norway give actual beer; Denmark, Finland and Switzerland are beverages or wider, which includes soft drinks, water, wine and spirits. Nothing on this page is summed across markets, and the two on-trade measures never share an axis.

German beer, last 12m vs 5 years ago

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Hectolitres, Destatis

Polish beer, same comparison

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Hectolitres, GUS

French beer, same comparison

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Production volume index, Eurostat

German on-trade VOLUME

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The only market publishing hospitality volume

On-trade turnover, same five years

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Median across the five value-index markets — price, not volume

Volumes are falling and turnover is rising

This is the single most useful thing on the page, and it only shows up because the volume and value measures are kept apart. Across the last five years European beer volumes are down by double digits, while hospitality turnover is up by twenty to thirty per cent. Germany is the one market that publishes both a volume and a value index for hospitality, and there the gap is explicit: volume — against turnover rising over the same period.

The practical consequence: any on-trade series other than Germany's is a revenue series and will look healthy through a volume decline, because it is measuring price. It is on this page for completeness, not as a demand read.

On-trade: Germany's volume against everyone's turnover

All rebased to each series' own 2015 average = 100, 12-month average. The solid line is a volume measure; the faint lines are turnover.

Beer production, where the data is genuinely beer

Germany, France, Poland and China only. Each series is rebased to its own 2015 average so the shapes can be compared; the levels never could be, since one is hectolitres, one is an index and one is kilolitres. Twelve-month average throughout, so the seasonal swing the weather tracker measures is deliberately removed here.

Beer output, rebased to 2015 = 100

Germany appears twice on purpose: the Destatis hectolitre series and the Eurostat index are independent measurements of the same market. They agree on the annual trend, which is what makes the Eurostat index trustworthy for France, where no physical-volume series exists.

Norway: actual litres, quarterly

The only physical beer volume in the Nordics. It is duty-declared sales, not production, so it excludes home-brew and cross-border buying — which in Norway is not a rounding error.

Norwegian beer sales, thousand litres

Quarterly since 2002. The seasonal shape is the point: Q2 and Q3 carry the volume, the same pattern the weather tracker finds in Germany and Poland.

Beverages, not beer

Denmark, Finland and Switzerland publish nothing at beer level at any frequency — confirmed empty across every seasonal adjustment and in the annual tables, so this is a real coverage gap rather than a missing parameter. What they do publish is the whole beverages class, or in Switzerland's case food, drink and tobacco together. Useful as a direction check on the market; not a beer number.

Beverages-level output, rebased to 2015 = 100

Every series, and what it actually measures

Market	Measure	Covers	Latest	YoY %	Last yr vs prev %	vs 5y ago %

Beer-level volume series first, then beverages-level, then the turnover indices. "Last yr vs prev" compares the most recent twelve months with the twelve before, which is steadier than a single month.

Coverage, and what does not exist

Market	Series	Covers	Freq	Obs	From	To

Not available free, after a full search: Sweden — the statistics office suppresses the whole beverages class for confidentiality, and the Eurostat series died in 2002. Denmark at beer level — annual only, back to 1921. UK on-trade — absent from Eurostat and the ONS API was retired in 2024. India at beer level — the free API returns only the latest month and no finer cut than "beverages". Switzerland at beer or beverage level — nothing at any frequency.

Known gaps in this page, not in the data: the UK publishes monthly beer production in actual litres (HMRC, from August 2023) and Vietnam publishes a beer-specific monthly index — neither is wired up yet. Both are documented in beer_data_survey.md.

Method

Eurostat production and services indices come from the free dissemination API (sts_inpr_m, sts_setu_m), calendar-adjusted, 2021 = 100. Norway is Statistics Norway table 04475. Germany is Destatis table 73421-0002, which is tax-warehouse sales including export rather than consumption. Poland is the GUS monthly release and covers firms of 50 or more staff only, so it misses small brewers. China is NBS output for above-designated-size firms, with holes through 2016-18 and no January, because January and February are published combined.

Rebasing to each series' own 2015 average is what allows different units on one chart. It makes the shapes comparable and the levels meaningless — a line being higher than another says nothing about who brews more beer.