This Is America’s Best Selling Beer

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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This Is America’s Best Selling Beer

© Drew Angerer / Getty Images

America is awash with beer. Huge brands like Budweiser can be found in almost any bar, convenience store, restaurant, or liquor store. “The King of Beers” has been among the best-selling brands in the U.S for decades. At the far end of the spectrum, microbreweries may only make enough to fill a few thousand bottles.

Beer production is met with extraordinary demand. Americans drink about 28 gallons of beer per capita per year. And, the number is uneven. For some reason, the number is almost double that in North Dakota, and a fraction in Utah.

Despite the beer thirst among Americans, other countries have much higher per capita numbers, with the Czech Republic in first place followed by Namibia, Austria, and Germany.

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To determine what we drink the most of — which brew is America’s best-sellers — 24/7 Tempo reviewed data from Beer Marketer’s Insights, an industry tracker and publishing company, ranking sales by barrels shipped in 2020. (Quantities are rounded off to one decimal place.)

Despite the rise of the microbrewing industry, at least three-quarters of the beer consumed in the U.S. is still produced by giants like Belgium-based Anheuser-Busch InBev (the world’s largest beer company) and Molson Coors Beverage Company..

The discerning German or British pub-crawler might cringe at the thought of quaffing a Bud Light or a Michelob Ultra, but these and similar brands are what we like to drink the most in this country.

In recent years, malt beverages that aren’t actually beer — like hard seltzers and hard iced tea — have emerged as alternatives to traditional beers, and they, too, are among the most popular choices for drinkers.

The best selling beer is Bud Light. Here are the details:

> Barrels shipped, 2020: 26.5 million
> Change from 2019: -6.50% — 14th largest decline
> Parent company: Anheuser-Busch InBev SA/NV

Click here to read America’s Top Selling Beers

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Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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