Alcohol Consumption & Production – you’d think the data would be easy?

I thought it might be interesting to look at alcohol consumption and production around the world. I expected the data to be pretty easy to find an process – how wrong can you be! Consumption figures came from the World Health Organization via Our World in Data, which publishes recorded per capita alcohol consumption broken down by beverage type — beer, wine and spirits — for most countries in the world, with data running up to 2020. The WHO figures measure litres of pure alcohol, so Claude converted these to litres of finished drink using standard ABV assumptions (beer 5%, wine 12%, spirits 40%). The total consumption layer uses pure alcohol to allow a fair comparison across drink types. For production, the picture was more complicated. Wine production figures came from the FAO via Our World in Data, with data up to 2023 — a much better source than what we found initially. Beer and spirits production came from the UN Industrial Statistics database (UNIDO), which has patchier coverage,…