The Dutch brand has taken the top spot in 2020 and, together with Asahi, overtaken Peroni. Heineken continues to invest in marketing its brand globally – most recently as the o cial sponsor of the Rugby World Cup in Japan.

Peroni has narrowed in on bartenders through sponsorship of the Class Bar Awards, Tales of the Cocktail and London Cocktail Week. Meanwhile, Asahi has a growing team of brand ambassadors and partnered with The World’s 50 Best Bars. The rise of Diageo’s Guinness is also no surprise. It remains the flagship brand of its style and the openning of a brewery in the US in summer 2018 is garnering renewed consumer interest.

Despite the obsession with craft brewing in the US, Europe and now parts of Asia, it's the big brands that still dominate. Only two of the beers are independant and you could hardly call Brewdog small anymore, which suggests the thirst for known brands won't dry up soon. Brewdog is now the number one trending beer for the first time, suggesting its operations in the US and Australia are beginning to take hold.

Top-end bars tend not to serve draft beer, which means the vast majority of sales are generated through packaged brands.

The beers with a large off-trade following, such as Peroni, tend to perform better than those known for their draft versions. However, the continued growth of premium cocktail pubs may begin to sway this trend.

Methodology

The results of this report are the culmination of a questionnaire of 106 bars around the world, each cherry-picked to take part based on their performance in global bar awards. We aim to find out not only which brands sell best but also what’s trending. These two data sets give us an insight into the brands that are doing the most volume and the brands that are hot right now.

To read more on the methodology of the Brands Report click here.