Czechia drinks more beer per person than anywhere
Welcome to Mapped — one dataset turned into one map, every week. This week: who drinks the world’s beer.
In 2024 the average Czech drank 148.8 litres of beer. That counts every child and every teetotaller, and it still works out to about 0.4 litres a day. Czechia has topped the table for 32 years running. The runner-up, Lithuania, drank 110.6.
The country that drinks the most beer in total is a different one. China, the world’s biggest beer market for 22 years running, drank 40.5 billion litres, about a fifth of all the beer in the world. Per person, that is around 29 litres, less than Japan.
Kirin, whose annual report this map is built from, publishes per-person figures for only about 40 countries, so grey on the map means no figure, not no beer.
Remix this map → Opens this exact map in the editor, data included. Change the numbers, the palette, the country. It’s your copy.
What you’re looking at
Litres of beer consumed per person in 2024, from Kirin Holdings’ annual world beer report, which has tracked the numbers since 1975. The lighter the colour, the more beer. Kirin publishes per-person figures for its top 35 countries plus four for reference; for eight more big markets (China, Vietnam, Colombia, Canada, Italy, France, Thailand, Ethiopia) we divided Kirin’s national totals by population.
The palest countries are Czechia, Austria and Lithuania, too small to read at world scale, so here is Europe up close:
The top of the table is Central Europe. Czechia 148.8, Lithuania 110.6, Austria 104.6, Ireland 99.0, Croatia 95.1. Thirteen of the top fifteen are European. Germany, the country people tend to guess, is 10th at 86.9, down two places in a year. The wine countries sit much lower: Italy works out at about 37 litres and France about 31, under half of Spain’s 91.8.
Panama tops the Americas. At 86.1 it edges Mexico (83.4), and both out-drink the US (65.4) and Brazil (70.3). Mexico’s total rose 5.4% in a year, to almost 10.8 billion litres, fourth in the world.
Africa’s highest published figure is Gabon’s. At 80.9 litres it sits just below Slovakia’s 81.0, and ahead of South Africa (75.2), whose total jumped from 10th to 7th in the world.
The fastest growth is where people drink the least. India’s beer consumption rose 14.6% in 2024, the most of any top-25 market. Yet it comes to 2.4 litres per person — about one bottle a person every three months.
And the big old markets are shrinking. China’s total fell 3.7%, Germany’s 2.2%, Japan’s 2.7%. Across the EU, beer consumption in 2025 was 9.2% below 2019. One beer in twelve drunk in the EU is now non-alcoholic.
The takeaway
The world’s beer total barely moved in 2024 (194 billion litres, up 0.5%). Underneath it, Europe and East Asia are drinking less, and India, Russia, Mexico and South Africa are drinking more.
Make this map yourself
The whole map is one maproll URL:
https://api.maproll.io/map.svg?scope=world
&data=IN:2.4,CN:28.8,JP:33.7,US:65.4,DE:86.9,LT:110.6,CZ:148.8,...
&theme=dark
&classification=custom&breaks=20,40,60,80,100,150
&legendTitle=litres%20per%20person,%20up%20to
Swap scope=world for bbox=-11,35,32,64 and the same data becomes the Europe map. Remix this map → or start from scratch.
Sources: Kirin Holdings, Global Beer Consumption by Country in 2024 (December 2025), built from brewers’ association questionnaires, the BarthHaas Report and GlobalData. Per-person figures count the whole population, drinkers or not. Figures for China, Vietnam, Colombia, Canada, Italy, France, Thailand and Ethiopia are Kirin’s 2024 totals divided by World Bank 2024 population, so they are estimates; checked the same way, Kirin’s own figures come out within about 4%. Japan’s figure includes happo-shu and “new genre” beer-like drinks. EU trend from The Brewers of Europe, European Beer Trends 2026. National statistics can differ from Kirin’s, depending on how they count non-alcoholic beer and cross-border purchases. Next week on Mapped: subscribe below to get it first.