I recently found a table with an overview of the number of breweries of 11 of 25 German States, split by top- and bottom-fermenting breweries, and total production volumes, again divided by top- and bottom-fermenting breweries.

I found it interesting because these statistics gave some insight into how prevalent bottom fermentation had become in some states, and which states’ breweries managed to brew on a larger scale than others.

So here are the raw numbers:

	Breweries		Production Volume [hl]
State	TF	BF	TF	BF
Prussia	4,594	1,983	6,064,756	16,220,485
Saxony	583	172	1,987,481	2,393,978
Hesse	17	210	1,097	998,493
Mecklenburg	351	46	129,254	412,878
Thuringia	345	656	323,738	2,131,323
Oldenburg	70	17	33,493	145,443
Braunschweig	43	34	25,498	450,966
Anhalt	55	18	95,406	316,109
Lübeck	26	6	38,498	105,175
Bremen	8	10	23,389	210,752
Hamburg	20	10	266,661	743,176

Now let’s look at the ratio of bottom- to top-fermenting breweries per state:

State	BF / TF
Prussia	0.43
Saxony	0.30
Hesse	12.35
Mecklenburg	0.13
Thuringia	1.90
Oldenburg	0.24
Braunschweig	0.79
Anhalt	0.33
Lübeck	0.23
Bremen	1.25
Hamburg	0.50

What’s very noticeable is that there are only three states with more bottom- than top-fermenting breweries: Hesse, Thuringia and Bremen. Hesse stands out especially because are over 12 times more bottom-fermenting breweries than top-fermenting breweries. Interestingly, most states still had a relatively large number of top-fermenting breweries. But once we look at the average production volumes per brewery of top- vs bottom-fermenting breweries, we’re getting a different picture:

	hl / Brewery
State	TF	BF	BF / TF
Prussia	1,320.15	8,179.77	6.20
Saxony	3,409.06	13,918.48	4.08
Hesse	64.53	4,754.73	73.68
Mecklenburg	368.25	8,975.61	24.37
Thuringia	938.37	3,248.97	3.46
Oldenburg	478.47	8,555.47	17.88
Braunschweig	592.98	13,263.71	22.37
Anhalt	1,734.65	17,561.61	10.12
Lübeck	1,480.69	17,529.17	11.84
Bremen	2,923.63	21,075.20	7.21
Hamburg	13,333.05	74,317.60	5.57

Very clearly, bottom-fermenting breweries were producing significantly more beer on average than top-fermenting breweries, across the board.

Again, the most noticeable is Hesse, but for a different reason: their average production volume per top-fermenting brewery is just 64 hl. Given that the number of top-fermenting breweries was tiny to begin with, this looks as if the last few remaining top-fermenting breweries were glorified home-breweries, not unlike what we had with Carinthian Steinbier in the decades before its demise.

The only state where top-fermenting brewing was still relatively strong was Hamburg, as it’s the only one with an average 5-digit hl production volume.

The main takeaway from these statistics is certainly that even though bottom-fermenting breweries were generally more industralised and at a more modern technical level with the capabilities to produce larger volumes of beer, many of the less mechanised top-fermenting breweries still seem to have hung around for a while. Unfortunately, these statistics don’t give any insight into what beer styles were brewed. A lot of them may still have been the old local beer styles.