This could be the antidote to the declining Hungarian beer consumption

In 2024, with more than 250 types of beers, craft specialties from the best domestic breweries, and a parade of international beer offerings from importers, the Downtown Beer Festival, with the support of SPAR Hungary, is waiting for visitors on Budapest’s Szabadság Square between September 3 and 8, whose goal this year is also , to make quality beer consumption trendy again among young people.

Around the time of the regime change, beer consumption in Hungary was roughly 100 liters per person per year. Gábor Knap, the editor-in-chief of beer magazine Beerporn.hu, informed about the current situation that this has now dropped to approximately 70 liters. However, the current selection cannot be compared to the previous one. Despite rising prices and the still low market share of small-scale breweries (3-4 percent), the Hungarian small-scale/craft beer segment continues to flourish from a consumer point of view. The innovative attitude of the leading Hungarian small-scale breweries has not changed, and they continue to appear on the market with several new products every month, he added.

In 2023, 11 percent less beer was sold than a year earlier, but at the same time last year, the audience could taste hundreds of beers from fifty exhibitors at the largest Hungarian beer festival. At the Downtown Beer Festival, which starts on September 3 and lasts until September 8, guests have an even wider choice than last year, said Dániel Kurucz, the main organizer of the festival.

The new, mostly seasonal, one-off specials continue to be released in the summer months mainly in New England IPA and various sour beer styles (berliner weisse, gose), and in the colder period of the year in the category of dessert beers and in the form of various stouts.