Land of the Beer part II

Quite some time has passed since my last post. Unfortunately, I was busy with work. As a PhD student in the life sciences, you have to spent some time in the lab, and when you have spent enough time (or your supervisor thinks you have), than you have to scrape your poor results together to write a lousy manuscript. Basically you have mixed feelings, because you did everything three times with three different outcomes, but your supervisor convinced you to ‘pick the best one’ (which means, the one that fits best to the story). Besides, you find that statistical tests are overrated, so you pick one which delivers a significant p-value and ignore contradictory ones. Don’t be concerned, everybody does it that way (The mentioned meta study found a non-expected over representation of p-values just below 0.05, a threshold usually regarded as significant). I must confess, I drew a rather dark picture here, but a lot of research is done that way because the pressure to publish is high.

But this is another story and it’s certainly more entertaining to take a look at some beer statistics. Luckily, each country has a brewer’s and maltster’s guild collecting data on breweries across the nation. Even better, they submit their data to the european brewers association which collects and releases the data. Their publications are of high quality, therefore we concentrate on just a very few aspects. The questions I had in mind were: Who’s the strongest producer, who’s the strongest consumer, which countries are explicitly exporters or importers and where are the most breweries. Here are the answers (click to enlarge).

Beer production and consumption in Europe in thousand litres.

Land of the Beer, Home of the Grape.

My recent posts featured a series of topics around nuclear energy [1, 2, 3]. This was not intended from the beginning on, but rather evolved by wiki-walking from one idea to another. With this post, I start a new series by intention, and it will be about… one of my favourite activities. But I won’t tell you right now, you’ll find out. I’d rather like to tell another story. Some time ago a friend of mine forgot a beer at my place, it was one of this kind. I usually avoid brands like these, because back in the days it used to smell like the parts of zoos where too many animals share too small cages. Anyway, I was desperate and gave it a shot. You won’t believe it, the zoo was gone and replaced by a pleasing smell of nothingness. The one you will find in 75 % of German large-scale brewed beers. Here in Germany beer is (still) the number one alcoholic beverage, although the big breweries always complain about dropping sales. For my part, I know exactly why. But whats the situation in Europe in general? Here are some numbers on the drinking habits of our neighbors (click to enlarge).