Na Zdorovie – To Your Health

Here's to alcohol; the cause of - and solution to - all life's problems

~Homer Simpson

You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline - it helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a BEER.

~Frank Zappa

Beer is quickly becoming something like a national obsession here. In a land where alcoholism is called the “Russian Disease”, that’s not a statement to be taken lightly.

Russia is the 5th largest market for beer in the world. Per capita consumption of ~50 liters per year earns it second place in Europe. Overall, market growth is expected to decelerate to 8% - 9% a year going forward, after torrid expansion throughout the 1990’s.

To illustrate that growth, take a look at per capita consumption trends. In the land of vodka, beer was a very substandard choice of beverage during soviet times. Russian beer was simply awful – I can attest to that personally through my experience in Kaliningrad in 1995. Per capita consumption in 1996 was a bit less than 15 liters. But changing trends, and much better brewing techniques, have changed the landscape for beer drinkers for the better. Much better – domestic beer is quite good. By 2007, per capita consumption is expected to be somewhere between 55 and 60 liters per person.

At the same time, however, Russia’s position as the top vodka consuming nation remains unchallenged. While beer consumption was exploding, per capita consumption of vodka has remained stable at about 10 liters per year. Oh, and by the way; Russia’s population is actually shrinking. It’s a bit of a public health crisis, frankly. And you can see it on the streets - even in the squeaky clean center of Moscow.

Beer is ubiquitous. It’s for sale in kiosks on every corner at any time of day or night. And its dirt cheap; in fact, at about 20 rubles a bottle ($0.65!!), it’s much cheaper than all other beverage choices - including Coca-Cola and bottled water. Moreover, it’s perfectly legal to consume beer anywhere you please – with the notable exception of the Metro. In fact, the garden bordering the Kremlin is a very popular place to lounge around with lots of beers.

Every morning, my commute takes me through Pushkin Square to the Metro stop. I walk through a park surrounded by kiosks and beer gardens (outdoor bars with seating under tents). What’s a pleasant park with a fountain is transformed at some point during the course of the night into an absolute mess. When I walk through in the morning, city workers are sweeping up broken glass and fishing bottles out of the fountain. Drunks, with their perpetual mysterious injuries and puffy, moon-shaped faces, are groggily waking up on park benches or washing up in the fountain. What’s even more shocking is that there are plenty of people – fresh from their homes – drinking beer and sitting on benches at a safe distance from the previous nights leftover drunks. At 8 am. It’s not unusual at all to see a decently dressed person obviously on his/her way to work or school, casually strolling down the street with a beer in hand. Not unusual? It’s downright common.

Moscow city government efforts to stem the public drinking problem are met with furious protest by the population. A proposal for an overall ban collapsed under public pressure last year, and similar ideas to limit areas of public drinking have provoked outrage this year.

In a way, you could call the 10 year boom in beer consumption the most successful political movement since Stalin’s first 5-year plan. After all, Russia fielded a political party called “The Beer Lovers’ Party” that not only met strict party registration requirements – but managed to win representation in the legislative body in 1996. The major plank of the party was to promote beer drinking as a tool for building national consensus. Its slogan was “May there always be something to drink and to eat.”

The Beer Lover’s Party is defunct now, I think. But the national beer blast they sponsored is still going strong.