This symposium in the Journal of Wine Economics contains a series of articles on various aspects of the economics of beer and brewing. Today, wine and beer are the two most widely consumed alcoholic beverages in the world. Beer consumption is larger than wine consumption both in terms of volume and value. In 2007 global beer consumption reached 174 billion liters compared to 24 billion liters for wine.
The global value of beer amounted to 153 billion US dollars, which was roughly double the global value of wine – around 75 billion US dollars (Colen and Swinnen, 2011).