Bavaria’s brewers ... and the rest
With a sales increase of 2.2 percent to 22.1 million hl Bavarian brewers did significantly better in 2011 than brewers in the rest of Germany, not least because they managed to rev up beer exports. Nevertheless, their best efforts could not stem a further decline in German beer sales which dropped 0.1 percent year-on-year, the Bavarian Brewers Association reported on 7 February 2012.
The 460,000 hl sales hike, favourable as it may seem to the 630 or so Bavarian brewers, needs to be taken with a pinch of salt: Which brewers contributed to it? Was it Munich’s major brewers? Or even the Bavaria-based cheap brewer Oettinger (6.2 million hl), whose eponymous brand happens to be Germany’s major beer brand?
No doubt, beer exports from Bavaria were up 12 percent and hit 3.8 million hl. That’s 17.4 percent of total Bavarian beer sales (the export rate for Germany is15.5 percent). But again, upon closer look, it was the southern Bavarian breweries (aka the Munich ones, one of whom also brews a brand like Beck’s) which contributed 70 percent to Bavaria’s beer exports.
Despite the hype around beer mixes (i.e. shandies), it was alcohol-free beers which added another 180,000 hl to Bavarian brewers’ sales to reach 1.5 million hl (or 7 percent of total sales). Beer mixes dropped 3.4 percent and languished at merely 500,000 hl.
Friedrich Düll, 49, the new President of the Bavarian Brewers’ Association said how deeply worried he was about the on-going price dumping in the German brewing industry. As a fifth generation brewer from Franconia – he joked that he was the first president the Bavarian brewers elected who had the least beer output – he would be. Traditionally, Franconia’s brewers do more pils beers than their southern Bavarian colleagues, which means they are more directly affected if the national pils brands run promotions in their core markets.
Moreover, he worried about the long-term consequences of price-dumping. "It will destroy brand values which have been painstakingly built over decades."
The pull of gravity: German beer sales 1993 –2011 (1000 hl)
