Global Beer Market Report, Size & Forecast 2026–2033

The brewery gate, not the shelf

Beer is the largest alcoholic category in the world by volume and the least comparable by value, because almost every published figure for it is a retail number whose multiple over the brewery price varies by a factor of four between an off-trade litre in Vietnam and an on-trade pint in Norway. This report takes the other route and says so in its first paragraph.

The world brewed 1,896.0 million hectolitres in 2025 — 189.6 billion litres — down 0.7 per cent on a restated 2024. Priced at the brewery gate that is USD 206.7 billion, and it is forecast at USD 265.6 billion in 2033 on 1,821.5 million hectolitres. That is 3.18 per cent of value growth on 0.50 per cent of volume decline, and the arithmetic between them is the whole report: the gate price of a litre rises from USD 1.0902 to USD 1.4581, 3.70 per cent a year.

The price is derived, and one market makes it possible. Germany publishes both a volume and a value: 6.8 billion litres of alcoholic beer produced in 2025 for a production value of EUR 6.4 billion, or EUR 0.94 a litre — USD 1.09 at the rate used here. Applied to the world's 189.6 billion litres that is USD 206.7 billion. A ten per cent error either side of that anchor gives USD 180.1 to 227.5 billion, which is the honest band around the headline and the only uncertainty in it.

A reader looking for the number a shopper spends will not find it here, and that is a decision rather than a gap. Excise, the distributor, the retailer and the on-trade operator all sit between USD 1.09 and the till, and their combined markup is not a constant: a supermarket litre and a bar litre are the same beer at four different prices. Averaging those into one world retail figure produces a number nobody can use for a decision. The gate figure is the one the production statistics actually support.

1,896 million hectolitres, and a revision two and a half times the size of the change

Global beer production fell 0.7 per cent to 1,896.0 million hectolitres in 2025, the second consecutive annual decline. The fall is 14.3 million hectolitres against a 2024 total of 1,910.0 million. But that 2024 figure was itself restated upward by 34.7 million hectolitres, mostly Chinese and Vietnamese statistics — 2.43 times the size of the annual change being measured against it.

That is the first thing any reader of beer data has to hold: the direction is unambiguous and the magnitude is inside the measurement error. A year-to-year movement of one per cent in this series is a rounding difference in two countries' reporting.

The geography has three distinct stories in it. The United States is the world's largest absolute decline, down 5.2 per cent, and Germany fell 5.6 per cent — the two richest large beer markets contracting at similar rates. Asia is a Chinese story: the continent lost 7.4 million hectolitres with China 2.3 million of it and Vietnam, Japan and South Korea the rest. Africa is the only continent that grew, up 2.6 per cent to 166.7 million hectolitres, and India grew 7 per cent to 35.1 million, entering the world's top twelve producers.

Put differently: beer's problem is not beer. It is that its two most valuable markets per litre are shrinking at 5 per cent a year while its growth is concentrated where the price per litre is lowest.

Two brewers, 37.9 per cent of every hectolitre

Beer is more concentrated than any other large category in beverage alcohol. Anheuser-Busch InBev brewed 484.2 million hectolitres in 2025 — 25.5 per cent of world output — and Heineken 235.7 million, 12.4 per cent. The top two together make 37.9 per cent of every hectolitre brewed on earth.

At the world's average gate price, AB InBev's volume is worth USD 52.8 billion — a derived figure, and one that understates its actual revenue because its portfolio is premium-weighted against the world average. The concentration is real, and it is also narrower than it looks: China Resources' 110.3 million hectolitres is almost entirely one country, which makes it a domestic champion in a global table.

The corporate event of the period is an exit rather than an acquisition. Diageo transferred its stake in Guinness Ghana to Castel in January 2025 and its shareholding in East African Breweries to Asahi in May 2026, keeping the Guinness brand in both markets. A spirits major selling brewery equity while keeping the brand is the same judgement Pernod Ricard made about wine in the same period: own the margin that travels, not the asset that does not.

USD 1.09 to USD 1.46: all of the growth is price

Realisation per litre moves from USD 1.0902 to USD 1.4581 over the forecast window — 3.70 per cent a year, 1.337 times in eight years. Volume falls 0.50 per cent a year. Value therefore rises 3.18 per cent a year, and 100 per cent of that is price.

This is the same machine as the wine market running at ten times the volume and a fifteenth of the price per litre. Wine is 208 million hectolitres at USD 25.41 a litre retail with volume falling 1.19 per cent; beer is 1,896 million hectolitres at USD 1.09 a litre at the gate with volume falling 0.50 per cent. Both categories grow in value while shrinking in volume, and in both the growth is entirely the price line.

The difference that matters commercially is the denominator. A point of price in beer is worth USD 2.07 billion of gate value; a point of price in wine is worth USD 5.28 billion of retail value. Beer moves 9.12 times the liquid and earns 0.392 times as much money for each point of price — which is why its returns come from share and from cost, and wine's from mix.

Nine per cent of German beer is now alcohol-free

The clearest measurement of beer's internal shift comes from the one country that publishes alcohol-free production separately. Germany made 616 million litres of alcohol-free beer in 2025, worth EUR 696 million, up 6.5 per cent on 2024's 579 million litres — while alcoholic beer fell 5.8 per cent to 6.8 billion litres. The ratio moved from 12.5 litres of alcoholic beer per litre of alcohol-free in 2024 to 11.1 in 2025.

9.06 per cent of German beer production is now alcohol-free, and the alcohol-free line grows at exactly the rate the alcoholic line falls. That is not a coincidence: in a country where beer consumption per head is falling, the only growth format is the one that lets an existing beer drinker keep the occasion without the alcohol.

The price signal inside that is the more interesting one. German alcohol-free beer carries a production value of EUR 1.13 a litre against EUR 0.94 for alcoholic beer — 1.20 times the price per litre at the gate, from a product that costs more to make and is taxed less. The premium is real and it is one of the few levers a mature brewer has: a category that cannot grow litres can grow price by changing what the litre is.

The forecast, and the one number it depends on

The forecast is 1,896.0 to 1,821.5 million hectolitres and USD 206.7 to 265.6 billion. It assumes world volume continues to fall at half a per cent — faster than 2025's revision-adjusted trend in Africa and India, slower than the 5 per cent declines in the United States and Germany — and that the gate price keeps rising at 3.70 per cent.

Both assumptions are stated rather than derived, because neither can be derived. Volume depends on whether Africa's 2.6 per cent growth outruns the American contraction, and that is a question about income, not about beer. Price depends on mix — how fast no-alcohol and premium formats take share of a falling litre count — and on whether duty systems continue to favour the low-alcohol product.

The number the forecast actually turns on is the price, not the volume. At half a per cent a year, the entire eight-year volume decline is 74.5 million hectolitres, about four per cent of the market. The 3.70 per cent price line adds USD 58.9 billion. If the price growth were 2 per cent instead, the 2033 value would be far closer to today's than the forecast implies — and volume, at these rates, would barely matter at all.

That is the last thing worth saying about beer: in a category growing 3.18 per cent on falling volume, the only decision that changes the outcome is the one about what the litre costs, and the only way to change that is to change what is inside it.

Companion analysis

India: USD 6.85 Billion of Beer and No Wine Market Anyone Can Size takes this report's volume series into the only large market where beer is still being bought rather than defended. The world brewed 14.3 million hectolitres less in 2025; India added 7 per cent to 35.1 million hectolitres and moved into the world's top twelve, inside Africa — the only continent that grew, +2.6 per cent to 166.7 million hectolitres — while the United States fell 5.2 per cent and Germany 5.6 per cent at almost identical rates. That is the evidence behind the article's own conclusion: India's constraint is distribution rather than demand, because a market compounding volume while its peers contract is not a market that has run out of drinkers. One boundary is observed on both pages rather than crossed — this report is priced at the brewery gate, and the India value the article quotes comes from a separate report, so the two are read side by side and never divided. The 35.1 million hectolitres is the part this report can state about that market on its own terms.

Table of Contents

• The brewery gate, not the shelf
• 1,896 million hectolitres, and a revision two and a half times the size of the change
• Two brewers, 37.9 per cent of every hectolitre
• USD 1.09 to USD 1.46: all of the growth is price
• Nine per cent of German beer is now alcohol-free
• The forecast, and the one number it depends on

Competitive Landscape

Four brewers, one strategy: fewer litres, higher price

The arithmetic is the finding. AB InBev’s 0.977 of prior-year volume multiplied by 1.044 of revenue per hectolitre gives 1.0200 — exactly the +2.0 per cent organic revenue it reported. Heineken’s 0.979 consolidated volume multiplied by 1.038 revenue per hectolitre gives 1.0162 — exactly its +1.6 per cent. Neither company’s growth contains a single litre. Every basis point of it was price and mix, which is the same conclusion this report reaches for the world in its forecast: 3.18 per cent of value growth on 0.50 per cent of volume decline.

Growth is migrating to breweries the majors do not own

Heineken’s licensed volume rose 17.8 per cent while its consolidated volume fell 2.1 per cent — twenty points apart inside one set of results. That is Heineken’s brand travelling into third-party plants in markets where it does not want the fixed cost. Carlsberg’s +17.7 per cent reported against −2.0 per cent organic is the same story from the other end: a 19.7-point gap made almost entirely of one acquisition — Britvic, at 24.0m hl, DKK 15,581m of revenue and DKK 2,195m of operating profit. The litre is becoming a licensing and bottling contract rather than a brewery.

Inside Carlsberg’s organic line the category split is the whole industry in miniature: premium beer +5%, alcohol-free brews +4%, soft drinks +3%, Beyond Beer −4%. The international brands did the work — Carlsberg +4%, Tuborg +2%, 1664 Blanc +2%.

Concentration: two brewers, 37.9 per cent of the world’s litres

Our own volume series puts Anheuser-Busch InBev at 25.5 per cent and Heineken at 12.4 per cent of the 1,896.0 million hectolitres brewed in 2025 — 37.9 per cent between them — with the remaining 62 per cent spread across a very long tail that includes 146 large non-craft plants and 9,578 craft breweries in the United States alone.

The United States: the first genuine shake-out

Brewers Association data for 2025: total US beer production and imports down 5.7 per cent; craft volume down 4 per cent; craft retail dollars USD 28.0bn, down 2.8 per cent, which is 24.8 per cent of a USD 113bn market. Craft’s volume share is only 13.4 per cent, so craft earns 1.85 times the retail dollar per litre that the market average does. The brewery count fell from 9,922 to 9,724 — a net loss of 198, or 2.9 per cent — with craft brewers down 2.9 per cent to 9,578 and regional craft down 0.4 per cent to 275. Net closures, not net openings. Price held the dollar line up while the litres left.

Africa: the marginal competitor is a state government

Benue Investment and Property Company in Nigeria is commissioning the Food Basket Brewery on NGN 10–15 billion (USD 6.7–10 million) of state money — 10,000 crates a day at start-up (720 hl), roughly 250,000 hl a year of capacity, 200 direct jobs in phase one, and a stated aim of keeping NGN 1 billion a month of beer consumption inside Benue State. When a subnational government builds a brewery to stop value crossing a state border, the competitive set is no longer the four listed companies above.

What this means for the forecast

Three of the four largest brewers lost volume in 2025 and all four grew revenue per hectolitre. A category that cannot sell more litres has decided to sell better ones — and both routes to a better litre, premiumisation and no-alcohol, are margin stories in a volume market, which is the first thing a trade-down destroys.

Value Chain

The gate is where our number stops, and it is USD 1.09 a litre

USD 206.7bn divided by 1,896.0 million hectolitres is USD 109.02 a hectolitre, USD 1.0902 a litre, at the brewery gate. The anchor is Germany, the one large market that publishes volume and value together: 6.8 billion litres for EUR 6.4 billion, EUR 0.94 a litre. That is a gate price, and it is the only government-grade gate price we hold.

Everything above the gate — distribution, retail margin, VAT, duty — is stripped out deliberately. The multiple between gate and shelf varies by roughly four times across markets, and averaging a supermarket litre and a bar litre produces a figure nobody can act on.

Duty is the largest single line, and it is priced on strength, not on value

A 500ml can at 4.5% ABV carries GBP 0.508 of duty (0.5 × 0.045 × 22.58) before the can, the malt, the freight, the brewer’s margin or the retailer’s. A 568ml pub pint at 4.0% carries GBP 0.442 at the draught rate. The pub pint pays less duty per serve than the supermarket can — a deliberate structural subsidy to the on-trade, and the only place in this value chain where the regulator has picked a winner.

The strength cliff: 2.267 times

Duty per litre of pure alcohol is GBP 22.58 at 4.5% ABV and GBP 9.96 at 3.4% — a factor of 2.267. Per litre of finished product the gap is wider still: 4.5% beer carries GBP 1.016 a litre in duty and 3.4% beer carries GBP 0.339, a threefold difference. The largest margin lever available to a brewer is a number chosen on a spreadsheet, not in a brewhouse.

Upstream: the one node with no pricing power

BarthHaas’s 2025/26 report describes a continuing oversupply of hops coinciding with falling beer consumption, with excess hop capacity intensifying downward pressure on prices. The hop grower is the only participant in the chain who cannot switch demand, cannot reformulate and cannot pass cost through — and therefore the node that absorbs the category’s decline. Alpha acid is a small share of a litre’s cost, which is precisely why its collapse has not appeared in the gate price.

Downstream: most of the money is not in this number

US retail beer sales alone were USD 113 billion in 2025, against a global brewery-gate market of USD 206.7bn. We do not publish a US retail-to-gate multiple because we do not hold a verified one, and the honest statement is that most of the consumer’s dollar is captured after our perimeter ends.

Packaging and freight: a declared hole

This report holds no verified per-unit cost for a can, a bottle, a keg or a container freight movement. The packaging discussion is qualitative by necessity. Anyone quoting packaging as a fixed percentage of a brewer’s cost is describing a different plant, in a different country, in a different year — we have seen the spread and will not average it.

Investment Activity

The capital went to the balance sheet, not to the brewhouse

What FIFCO actually buys

Heineken’s USD 3.2 billion secures the remaining 75 per cent of Distribuidora La Florida — Costa Rica’s century-old national beer Imperial, a soft drinks business with own brands and a PepsiCo bottling licence, and more than 300 proximity retail outlets trading as Musmanni and Musi — plus full ownership of HEINEKEN Panama and an equal partnership in Nicaragua’s leading beer business. Costa Rica becomes one of Heineken’s top five operating companies by operating profit.

The multiple is the message: 11.6 times EV/EBITDA on 2024 results for a national brand plus a shop estate plus a bottling licence. That is a growth multiple, paid in the one region where the group’s own beer volume was not growing.

What Carlsberg actually bought

Britvic is a soft drinks company. In its first year it delivered 24.0m hl, DKK 15,581m of revenue and DKK 2,195m of operating profit, and Carlsberg is separately preparing to take over a substantial soft drinks business in Central Asia. The largest single deployment of capital in the brewing industry in 2025 was not into beer.

Where capital is leaving

The US brewery count fell 198 net in one year, to 9,724 (−2.9%). Brewpubs, taprooms and microbreweries all contracted. The smallest node in this value chain is being liquidated, and its equipment is not being redeployed into larger plants — it is being sold second-hand or scrapped.

The one greenfield addition is state capital

Benue State’s NGN 10–15 billion (USD 6.7–10 million) Food Basket Brewery is the only new brewing capacity documented in this chapter, and no brewer financed it. The marginal entrant in the fastest-growing continent is a government pursuing import substitution, not a company pursuing return on capital.

The read-across

The three largest brewers spent the year buying soft drinks, buying distribution, buying back equity and removing roles. None committed meaningful capital to new brewing capacity in a developed market. When the cheapest asset a brewer can buy is its own cash flow, that is a statement about expected volume growth, and it is not a bullish one.

Technology & Innovation

The only genuine process innovation removes the alcohol

• AB InBev: no-alcohol beer revenue up 27 per cent in Q3 2025, inside a quarter in which megabrand revenue grew 3.0 per cent and Corona grew 6.3 per cent outside its home market.
• Carlsberg: alcohol-free brews up 4 per cent organic — one of only two growth categories it reported.
• Heineken: the Heineken brand grew 2.7 per cent in a year the group’s total volume fell 1.2 per cent.

De-alcoholisation — vacuum distillation or reverse osmosis — is the only change in the brewhouse that moves a product across a tax boundary. At 0–1.2% ABV the UK duty is GBP 0.00. Our own no-alcohol report found German alcohol-free beer carrying a gate value of EUR 1.13 a litre against EUR 0.94 for the alcoholic product it replaces — a 1.20x premium on something made from the same grist, protected by novelty rather than by process. That premium compresses the moment capacity arrives, and capacity is arriving.

The cheapest innovation in beer is one number

Because duty is levied per litre of pure alcohol, a brewer can launch a “new” product by editing the ABV. Moving from 4.5% to 3.4% cuts duty per litre of alcohol by 56 per cent and duty per litre of product from GBP 1.016 to GBP 0.339, with no new plant, no new packaging line and no consumer education. That is why mid-strength and session formats keep appearing — and why none of them holds a margin, because any competitor can copy the number in a week.

The technology that actually scaled is not in the brewery

AB InBev’s BEES B2B marketplace carried USD 935 million of third-party gross merchandise value in Q3 2025, up 66 per cent. That is the largest technology platform in the category, it is growing many times faster than the beer, and it does not make beer — it sells other suppliers’ products into outlets AB InBev already serves. Carlsberg’s Beyond Beer fell 4 per cent organic in the same year: the products are hard, the distribution layer is where the software margin lives.

Why there is no moat

A brewhouse is vessels and a recipe; neither is protectable. The United States alone supports 9,724 breweries and 146 large non-craft plants on the same technology. The barrier to entry is low, the barrier to distribution is high, and the only durable assets are the brand and the route to market — which is exactly where AB InBev and Heineken are concentrating their spend, and exactly what a 250,000-hectolitre state brewery does not have.

Market Risk

1. Basis risk — this number cannot be added to the wine hub. USD 206.7bn here is a brewery-gate figure; the wine and spirits reports in this segment are retail. Gate and retail differ by a multiple that varies by roughly four times across markets. This is the third report in the beverages segment carrying a warning of this shape, and it is not a footnote: a reader who adds USD 206.7bn to the wine hub’s USD 528.4bn has produced a number with no meaning.

2. The base year is less certain than the forecast. The 2024 figure underlying this series was restated upward by 34.7 million hectolitres for China and Vietnam. The 2025 annual change is 14.3 million hectolitres — so the revision is 2.43 times the size of the movement it is being used to measure. Any one-year conclusion drawn from this series is drawn inside the measurement error.

3. Duty. UK Alcohol Duty rose again on 1 February 2026; beer sits at GBP 22.58 per litre of pure alcohol. The Scotch Whisky Association puts the total spirits duty increase at more than 17 per cent in three years, and beer shares the same escalator. The UK is not the world, but it is the market where the duty mechanism is most legible, and it is the template other governments copy.

4. Currency translation. AB InBev reported organic revenue +2.0 per cent against reported −0.8 per cent — a 2.8-point gap on USD 59.3 billion of revenue, roughly USD 1.7 billion that existed in local currency and did not exist in dollars. Any forecast expressed in dollars on a business earned in naira, real, rupee and peso carries that exposure permanently.

5. United States volume. Total production and imports −5.7 per cent, craft −4 per cent, brewery count −2.9 per cent in 2025. Our own series has the US contracting 5.2 per cent. The take-home channel is no longer substituting premium for volume; it is losing both.

6. Growth concentration. Africa is 8.79 per cent of world litres and the only continent that grew (+2.6 per cent to 166.7 m hl); India is 1.85 per cent and grew 7 per cent. The entire growth case rests on two geographies where excise, currency and distribution can all move faster than thirst.

7. This is a price forecast wearing a volume series. 3.18 per cent of annual value growth against 0.50 per cent of annual volume decline means every point of the forecast is price and mix. If premiumisation stalls — and the US craft dollar line falling 2.8 per cent on 4 per cent less volume says it is stalling — the value line follows the volume line down at 0.50 per cent, not up at 3.18.

Regulatory Landscape

The tax is the product architecture

UK Alcohol Duty, 1 February 2026, per litre of pure alcohol — and what each band has actually manufactured:

Three of those five bands exist in order to change behaviour. A brewer’s portfolio is now a tax plan.

Beyond the UK

• EU: excise on beer is levied per degree Plato, so a lower-gravity beer is taxed less by construction across the single market — the same incentive as the UK’s strength bands, expressed in a different unit and harmonised across 27 countries.
• Ireland: the Public Health (Alcohol) Act requires health warnings, alcohol content in grammes and a calorie declaration on alcohol sold in Ireland, applying to imported beer exactly as to domestic. It was the first regime of its kind in the EU and is being watched as a template.
• Packaging: the EU’s Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (EU) 2025/40 imposes recycled-content and reuse obligations across formats, and the UK’s four-nation deposit return scheme is scheduled for 2027. A DRS re-orders this value chain: a brewer with a returnable bottle system gains a structural cost advantage over one on one-way glass, and the reverse-vending estate becomes an entry barrier that no brewer currently owns.
• Labelling: the direction of travel in every developed market is mandatory nutrition and health information on the container. Beer’s advantage over spirits — less alcohol per serve — is also its exposure, because it is the category a regulator can reach with a rule per container rather than per unit.

The closing observation

The regulator has priced the two variables a brewer actually controls — strength and format — and left the brand unpriced. That is why the brand is the only asset in this chain with a moat, and why this chapter and the competitive chapter reach the same conclusion from opposite directions.

Sources

Every figure in this report that carries weight traces to one of the publishers below. The link goes to the publisher’s own site and the specific release is named so a reader can find it. Where a figure is our arithmetic on a published number rather than a published number itself, the closing paragraph of this block says so.

• BarthHaas, BarthHaas Report 2025/26: barthhaas.com. World beer production of 1,896.0 million hectolitres, the 2024 base and its restatement of 34.7 million hectolitres.
• Destatis, the German federal statistical office: destatis.de. 6.8 billion litres of alcoholic beer produced for a production value of EUR 6.4 billion in 2025, which is the single anchor under this report’s value line.
• Anheuser-Busch InBev, fiscal 2025 results: ab-inbev.com. Reported revenue of USD 59,320m, organic volume of minus 2.3 per cent, revenue per hectolitre of plus 4.4 per cent, normalized EBITDA margin of 35.8 per cent, free cash flow of USD 11.3bn, net debt at 2.87 times, the USD 6bn buyback and BEES third-party gross merchandise value.
• Heineken N.V., fiscal 2025 results: theheinekencompany.com. Volume of minus 1.2 per cent total and minus 2.1 per cent consolidated against plus 17.8 per cent licensed, organic revenue of plus 1.6 per cent, an operating margin of 15.2 per cent, and the Imperial acquisition at USD 3.2bn and 11.6 times EV/EBITDA.
• Carlsberg Group, fiscal 2025 results: carlsberggroup.com. Reported revenue of DKK 89,095m against organic volume of minus 2.0 per cent, and the Britvic contribution of 24.0m hectolitres, DKK 15,581m of revenue and DKK 2,195m of operating profit.
• Brewers Association, 2025 craft brewing data: brewersassociation.org. The brewery count falling from 9,922 to 9,724, 9,578 craft breweries, craft volume at 13.4 per cent, and craft retail dollars of USD 28.0bn inside a USD 113bn market.
• Benue Investment and Property Company, a Benue State government company in Nigeria: the Food Basket Brewery at NGN 10 to 15bn, 10,000 crates a day at start-up and roughly 250,000 hectolitres a year. The company publishes no corporate site, so there is no link on this entry rather than a broken one.
• UK Government, Alcohol Duty rates: GBP 22.58 per litre of pure alcohol and the 1.2 per cent zero band: gov.uk/guidance/alcohol-duty-rates.

What is ours and not a publisher’s. The 1,896.0 million hectolitre series is read from BarthHaas; the restatement arithmetic, the 0.7 per cent decline and its comparison with the size of the revision are ours. USD 1.0902 a litre at the gate, USD 206.7bn of world gate value, the USD 180.1 to 227.5bn band and the USD 265.6bn forecast are all our arithmetic on the Destatis anchor at the exchange rate used in this report. The 25.5 per cent and 12.4 per cent shares and the 37.9 per cent concentration figure are our volume series against world production, not a published market-share table. The revenue-per-hectolitre reconciliations, 0.977 multiplied by 1.044 and 0.979 multiplied by 1.038, are checked against the companies’ own reported organic revenue and are stated here because they demonstrate that the growth contains no volume. Duty per serve at 500ml and 4.5 per cent, and at 568ml and 4.0 per cent, is the published rate applied to the serve, not a published number.