German Beer Sales Are Falling

Sales at German breweries fell 2.5 percent last year to the lowest level since the country’s statistics office started collecting the data in 1993, hurt by a conflux of trends including the aging population. Germans are increasingly downing Biermischgetraenke, ready-mix combinations of beer and soft drinks that flout the country’s purity law. Those concoctions, as well as alcohol-free variants, don’t get counted as real brew, and the tally also omits beers imported from outside the European Union.