When my students as me to recommend some good reading material, The Economist is one of the few publications that I recommend. As I tell them, the hardest part of the journal to understand are the headlines, as more or less every single one of them incorporates a pun.
Here is something that caught my eye today:
Pilsendämmerung (as opposed to Götterdämmerung)
Helles for other people (instead of "L'enfer - c'est les autres" - hell is other people. As Satre once said)
A nation loses its taste for its most heavenly tipple,
Germany is losing its taste for beer—at least the boozy kind
The Economist (EU)
SUMMON THE idea of the German at play, and chances are you see a rosycheeked Lederhosen- or Dirndl- clad youngster bearing half a dozen overflowing steins of beer. Never mind that—as the rest of Germany will hasten to remind you—you have taken Bavaria as a synecdoche for the entire country. The real problem with this image is that Germans are losing their taste for the tipple that once defined them.
On August 1st Germany’s statistical office announced that in the first half of 2025, six-month beer sales had fallen below 4bn litres for the first time since it began counting in 1993. In 2005 the median German quaffed 112 litres of the stuff. The figure is now less than 90. Germany remains the sixth-biggest beer market in the world. But whereas Germans once downed more than anyone bar the insatiable Czechs, they are now eighth in the per-person league table. Worse, the decline is gathering pace. “Panic” has gripped some breweries, says Gerrit Blümelhuber, a consultant.
Some of the culprits are familiar: Germany is ageing, and younger folk are less keen on booze. Some blame cost, though that seems hard to square with the €15 ($17.40) Kisten (crates) of Paulaner on supermarket shelves. Struggles in hotels and restaurants point to a broader hospitality problem. And yet the decline in wine-drinking is much gentler. “There is a noticeable thirst for beer in Germany,” says Volker Kuhl, CEO of the C&A Veltins brewery, but “no desire for a third or fourth glass”.
If there is a glimmer in the glass it is the booming non-alcoholic sector, which now accounts for almost one-tenth of beer brewed in Germany (though it is excluded from official statistics). Rare is the Biergarten without an alkoholfrei offer; last year Munich saw its first devoted solely to boozeless brews. Germany’s sometimes-staid Braumeister are trying new techniques like using wild yeasts that do not ferment all the sugar in the brewing process. But Germany’s storied purity law, which limits what can be marketed as beer, is not always an invitation to innovate, warns Markus Raupach of the German Beer Academy.
Even in the brightest forecasts, non-alcoholic beer cannot possibly compensate for the decline in the boozy sort. Nor can exports, which are dwindling even more quickly than domestic sales and now face Donald Trump’s tariffs. Nearly 100 German breweries have closed in the past five years; more will surely follow. A sobering thought.
