How Many Craft Beer Drinkers in New Zealand?

I have collected a few stats over the last month, and thought maybe I could try to extrapolate how many craft beer drinkers in New Zealand there are.

Population of New Zealand – 4.5 million

under 15 years old – 900,000

% who drink alcohol (15+yo) – 80%

= 2,880,000 people drink alcohol

10% of drinkers drink half the alcohol/beer – 288,000 people

Total beer production 290 million litres (sorry I haven’t found the latest figures, but that is pretty close)

This would mean 2,592,000 people would drink 145,000,000 litres of beer. (assumption, no craft beer drinkers are binge drinkers)

Now the difficult part is trying to work out how much of the beer market is craft, and how you define craft beer. If you include Mac’s and Monteith’s then it could be as high as 10% or based on the Brewers Guild of New Zealand estimate it may be as low as 2%.

I will use a figure of 5% which is kind of middle and discounts the some of the Mac’s and Monteith’s volume being their kind of mainstream lager with a craft badge.

Therefore:

7,250,000 million litres of craft beer in New Zealand (produced by 70 craft breweries)

129,600 craft beer drinkers in New Zealand