As beer lovers around the world are enjoying the seemingly endless variety of their favorite drink, it's easy to forget how much of the world’s beer production is actually controlled by just a few brewing conglomerates. Over the past two decades, companies such as Anheuser Busch InBev, Heineken or Carlsberg have consolidated hundreds of beer brands under their roofs, creating an illusion of choice for consumers around the world.
Take the five most valuable beer brands according to Brand Finance for example, four of which belong to AB InBev, which owns world-famous brands such as Budweiser, Beck’s, Stella Artois, Leffe, Modelo and Corona. And while the company was forced to sell the U.S. business of the latter two to Constellation Brands due to antitrust concerns in relation to its acquisition of Mexican Grupo Modelo, it still goes to show what a wide variety of international brands the world’s largest brewing group owns.
You could easily go to a bar, try five different beers from five different countries, possibly even continents, without realizing that AB InBev was your exclusive beer provider for the evening. And while we have seen a boom in independent craft breweries over the past few years, their output is still dwarfed by the aforementioned global players. According to the Brewers Association, America’s almost 10,000 operating craft breweries produced 23.4 million barrels (around 28 million hectoliters) of beer in 2023. AB InBev alone produced roughly 18 times that amount according to official company figures tracked by hops specialist BarthHaas. Collectively, the six largest brewing groups displayed in our chart accounted for more than 60 percent of global beer production in 2022. Meanwhile, the 40 largest brewing groups in the world, accounted for 88 percent of global beer output in 2022, showing how small the impact of independent brewers is at the global scale.
Note: Total figures for global beer output in 2023 haven't been published yet, which is why the shares of global beer production refer to 2022 figures in the last paragraph.
