2020 was a difficult year for the global brewing industry. While estimates vary, there is general agreement that world beer production was down between 7-10% this past year. Certain regions were particularly hard hit such as Africa, Asia and Europe with output drops in the order of 10-15%, while North and South America fared better with production down 2-5%. In China, the world’s largest brewer, production is estimated to have fallen by 8-10%, or 30-35 million hectolitres. To put that in perspective, total Canadian beer production is around 20 million hectolitres. In Japan, beer sales reportedly dropped 9% in 2020, while in Vietnam beer production is estimated to have fallen 14%. Mexico, which shuttered breweries for over 2 months during the April-June period last year, saw a production drop of about 5%.<\/p>\n
Europe was also hard hit with production estimated to have fallen overall by 9%. In contrast, the impact on total beer output in Canada and the United states was less pronounced with production estimated to have fallen by only 2-3%. A dramatic increase in retail sales in the U.S. and Canada made up for a substantial portion of the drop in on-premise sales, sales at concerts and sporting events etc. This resulted in a major increase in sales of canned, and to a lesser extent bottled, beer (leading to a shortage in aluminum cans) although there was a corresponding dramatic drop in keg sales. In Canada, beer sales volumes dropped by less that 1% in 2020 compared with 2019 according to Beer Canada data. <\/p>\n
Looking forward, the recovery in 2021 has already begun in many parts of the world. China’s beer production is estimated to have recovered to close to pre-pandemic levels already, and similarly in Europe things are improving. However the consensus is that in many countries, 2021 will be a year of gaining back sales lost in 2020 to return to 2019 levels as opposed to a year of growth. As one malting industry representative commented recently, while we haven’t turned the corner yet, at least we can see it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
2020 was a difficult year for the global brewing industry. While estimates vary, there is general agreement that world beer production was down between 7-10% this past year. Certain regions were particularly hard hit such as Africa, Asia and Europe with output drops in the order of 10-15%, while North and South America fared better […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[3,34],"tags":[],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cmbtc.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5252"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cmbtc.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cmbtc.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cmbtc.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cmbtc.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5252"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/cmbtc.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5252\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5267,"href":"https:\/\/cmbtc.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5252\/revisions\/5267"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cmbtc.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cmbtc.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cmbtc.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}