Yes, before you ask, Russia does go for vodka and Mexicans choose tequila. My colleague Ritchie King ( while he was working at Quartz) used Euromonitor data to look in even more detail at which spirits are purchased in each country. That’s far more than any other country - including Russia, where the average is 326 measures. If you assume that 1.5 fluid ounces is a normal measure of hard liquor (that’s about a shot-glass worth), then the average person in Grenada drinks 438 measures of spirit per year. In Germany, the average is 346 cans, and in the U.S. Namibia is the world’s biggest beer-drinking country, with 376 12-ounce cans of beer consumed per person. The wine consumption of the drinking population of France will be higher still. Remember though, these are just drinking figures per capita - they don’t take all those abstainers into consideration. The French consume more wine than people in any other country - 370 glasses of wine per person per year, compared to just 84 glasses in the U.S. Some of that data conforms to stereotypes. Here are the countries that drink the most of each drink in per-capita terms (you can find the full results in the lengthy table at the bottom of this article): The results show how many glasses of wine, cans of beer and shots of spirits were drunk per person in each country in 2010. But to make the comparisons more comprehensible (after all, when was the last time you ordered a liter of pure alcohol?), I’ve taken average alcohol content and average serving size for each beverage and converted those numbers into standard serving sizes. ![]() ![]() WHO presents the data in liters of pure alcohol consumed in 2010. The data also describes consumption by beverage type: wine, beer, spirits and “other.” To break consumption down by beverage, WHO again used government records as well as statistics from the alcohol industry and the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization database. It has national data on average alcohol consumption per capita for those age 15 and over in each country. Luckily, being a health organization, WHO isn’t just interested in who is and isn’t drinking - it wants to know what’s in their glasses and how much they’re knocking back. People in Islamic countries conformed to assumptions (mine at least) about being the most likely to abstain from alcohol, but what about international trends in alcohol consumption? After looking at trends within the U.S., I compared the percentage of lifetime abstainers in countries across the world using data from the World Health Organization (WHO). On Friday, I responded to a question from a reader who wanted to know how many people had, like him, never had a drink of alcohol.
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