One of my favorite things about the internet is that one is constantly making new, unexpected discoveries whenever one fires up Google. You just never know what you’ll find, and since my mind works in tangents, references, and connections I can easily fritter away entire afternoons wandering about. Anyway, I stumbled across these charts at the graphic designer’s website who created them for SloshSpot last year. His name is Jess Bachman and they’re wonderful presentations of statistical information on beer consumption. SloshSpot used them last October for a post they called The Year in Beer: Beer Drinking in America by Volume. Bachman did a total of eight charts, three of which are shown below. The original captions are show in blockquotes. Here’s how Bachman describes the project:

Essentially it’s one point of data, the amount of beer consumed in the US annually, only it is envisioned in several different ways. Very large numbers are difficult to conceptualize and very large volumes, areas, and other measurements are even further out of the minds grasp. So this is an attempt to take this data point and play with it until the reader comes away with a better sense of the American appetite for this frothy brew.

You can see the rest either at Jess Bachman’s website or the original SloshSpot post. There are a couple of small errors (like malt is incorrectly listed as a “grain”) but it’s a pretty cool series of graphic design with great visuals to give an interesting perspective on the data.

Only China is has a greater thirst, but they also have an extra billion people’s thirst to quench so with only one fourth of the population, we certainly hold our own.

With moon-landing levels of public support, cooperation and diligence, we could get this lasting testament to the wonders of Beer created, and filled too. OK, still day dreaming here, but if you just wanted to visualize 30 teragrams of liquid, here you go. What’s a teragram? It’s a scientific way of saying “that’s fucking heavy!”

Speaking of the moon, where would a visualization attempt be without some reference to the distance to the moon? If its too big for “around the earth x times”‘ then its “to the moon and back x times”. Well this one was quite short of making it to our nearest neighbor, Mars, but this stack of cans tops out at a respectable 4.8 million miles of space. And just for you terrestrial types, that’s around the earth 185 times. But really, what a waste of beer.