Cider Consumption in Asturias: By the Numbers

Hernández, Bernat & Labaula Arquitectos, Módulo Sícera, 2013, Gijón, Spain (more commonly known as Árbol de la sidra or El Árbolon.)

Asturians drinks a lot of cider. That is a mostly uncontroversial statement. Everywhere I look people are drinking cider. It is impossible to imagine any gathering anywhere in Asturias that didn’t involve drinking cider. But how much is it really? What are the cider consumption numbers for Asturias, and how do they stack up? Is this place as truly cider mad as I think it is?

World Cider Rankings

According to the National Association of Cider Makers’ Paul Mitchell, Spain ranks sixth in the world in millions of liters of cider consumed per year.

As you can see below, Spain is one of the Big Six cider drinking countries.

Cider production/consumption and trends by country and region. Total estimated sales value worldwide in 2005 were more than US$ 3 billion.

That information can be used to plot a consumption per capita number for each of those countries:

National Consumption of Cider Source: Merwin et. al 2007, Statista, 2022

Country	Pop (millions)	Cider Consumption (million L)	Liters per capita
UK	67	510	7.6
South Africa	59	170	2.9
France	65	125	1.9
Ireland	5	80	16.0
Spain	47	70	1.5

A more interesting picture emerges here. While the UK is still awash in cider, it becomes the Irish who are most cider mad when you look at liters per capita. Double the consumption of cider in Ireland versus in the UK.

Asturian Cider Consumption

But what is really interesting is that Asturias consumes vastly more cider than the rest of Spain combined. The current best estimates are that 77% of all cider consumed in Spain is drunk in Asturias. That means, if you were to give Asturias its own entry, based on 77% of Spains consumption, the European cider drinking picture becomes very different:

Asturias ranked as if it were a country. 77% of the Spanish consumption

Region	Pop (millions)	Cider Consumption (million L)	Liters per capita
Asturias	1	54	54.0

Asturians consume more than three times the cider per person than the Irish. That is a serious difference! More importantly, it lines up with what I see on the street in Asturias. Even coming from the most cider-loving parts of Europe, people are often amazed at just how cider crazy Asturias is. And it is absolutely no stretch of the imagination to see Asturias consuming 12 gallons of cider a year. As I have explained elsewhere, Asturian culture is cider culture.