The World According to Frank Zappa

The musician and noted beer-drinker Frank Zappa once said, “You can’t be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer.”

Which seems as good as criteria as any for defining nationhood. Self-governance? International recognition? A monopoly on the use of force? Seems arbitrary. Let’s go with a much more comprehensive definition, as laid out by a musician who has been dead for thirty years.

And since Who Owns My Beer has catalogued beers from every country in the world that has them, we figured we’d make it clear which so-called countries are and aren’t real according to Zappa’s definition. While the United Nations claims there are 195 countries in the world, and the CIA says there are 237, we’re here to tell you that there area really only 171. And here they are:

Now of course, there are a couple of caveats here. First off, it’s not clear whether Frank is talking about soccer or American football, but since he’s from Baltimore we’re assuming he meant American (and anyway, if he was talking about soccer this map would be a lot more one-sided).

As for what it means for a country to have a beer, we’re defining that to mean that a beer is:
a) originating in that country
b) still in production in that country, and
c) professional licensed and/or distributed (no doubt there are a couple of homebrewers in Afghanistan, but until they go pro we’re marking it zero).

Now while we’ve endeavored to research as much as possible to get this right, there are undoubtedly some oversights here, so if you have a correction to make (or if your favorite beer from a particular country is missing from our database) be sure to make a submission here. And for a full list of each country and their classification, check below (click the link on each country to see the beers that originate there).