Updated 20 August 2026 · 3 min read · by the Geopolitix team
Romania drinks the most alcohol of any country, 16.8 L of pure alcohol per adult per year, ahead of Georgia (14.4 L) and Latvia (12.9 L). Total alcohol counts beer, wine and spirits together, in litres of ethanol per adult. Data: Our World in Data / WHO, 2019–2020, 169 countries.
The 10 heaviest-drinking countries
Litres of pure alcohol per adult (15+) per year, all drink types combined.
#
Country
Alcohol
1
🇷🇴 Romania
16.8 L
2
🇬🇪 Georgia
14.4 L
3
🇱🇻 Latvia
12.9 L
4
🇱🇹 Lithuania
12.1 L
5
🇨🇿 Czechia
12 L
6
🇩🇪 Germany
11.8 L
7
🇵🇱 Poland
11.7 L
8
🇧🇾 Belarus
11.6 L
9
🇧🇬 Bulgaria
11.6 L
10
🇦🇹 Austria
11.5 L
Source: Our World in Data · data 2019–2020 · 169 countries ranked · the same table Geopolitix rounds are drawn from.
The drinking belt, drawn
Total alcohol is the clearest regional gradient on this blog: a dark band from the Baltic through central Europe into the Caucasus, fading westward across France and Iberia, dropping to almost nothing across North Africa, the Gulf and South Asia. East Africa's dark patches are the unrecorded home-brewed alcohol that commercial-sales rankings never see.
Hover or tap any country for its value. Tap a legend colour to isolate a band.
Alcohol, 169 countries, shaded by rank. Source: Our World in Data · data 2019–2020. Projection: Equal Earth, so every country's area is honestly proportioned.
One number, three drinks, every adult in the country averaged together, including the ones who never drink at all. That last clause matters more than anything else on this page: a country where 30% of adults abstain and the rest drink heavily can score the same as a country where everybody drinks moderately. Averages hide drinking culture, and this average hides two very different ones.
The band that runs from the Baltic to the Balkans
Look at the top 15 and a shape appears: a belt of countries running from the Baltic states down through central Europe into the Balkans and the Caucasus. Latvia (3rd), Lithuania (4th), Czechia (5th), Poland (7th), Bulgaria (9th) and Georgia (2nd) all sit inside it. Germany, at 6th on 11.8 L, is the western edge of that belt rather than an outlier.
The countries most people guess are lower than they think. Russia is 21st on 10.5 L, after two decades of the sharpest fall in alcohol consumption of any large country. Ireland is 17th, the United Kingdom 18th, the United States 29th on 9.9 L, and France, whose reputation was built on daily wine, is 24th.
The bottom of the table is the most predictable in world data
The lowest-consuming countries: near-total abstention, mostly by law and custom.
#
Country
Alcohol
169
🇸🇴 Somalia
0 L
168
🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia
0 L
167
🇲🇷 Mauritania
0 L
166
🇰🇼 Kuwait
0 L
165
🇸🇩 Sudan
0 L
164
🇱🇾 Libya
0 L
163
🇦🇫 Afghanistan
0 L
162
🇾🇪 Yemen
0 L
Source: Our World in Data · data 2019–2020 · 169 countries ranked · the same table Geopolitix rounds are drawn from.
Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Libya, Mauritania and Somalia sit at or near zero, and a handful of other Muslim-majority countries follow just above them. Turkey (129th, 1.7 L), Indonesia (161st) and Egypt (156th) are the interesting middle cases: legal, taxed heavily, and drunk by a small minority.
Which drink, not just how much
Total alcohol tells you the volume; the breakdown tells you the culture. Portugal is 1st for wine, Latvia 1st for spirits, Czechia 1st for beer. Romania makes the top of the total table by having a serious position in all three at once, which is rarer than it sounds.
Same five countries, four different tables. Ranks out of 168 countries.
Country
Total
Beer rank
Wine rank
Spirits rank
Romania
16.8 L
11th
18th
21st
Czechia
12 L
1st
21st
16th
France
10.3 L
57th
3rd
40th
Latvia
12.9 L
19th
41st
1st
United States
9.9 L
28th
39th
13th
How to remember this table
East, not west. The heavy end of the alcohol map is eastern and central Europe plus the Caucasus, not the drinking cultures with the best marketing.
Russia has fallen. 21st, not top three. This one fact catches most people out.
Two African countries in the top 15, because unrecorded home brewing is counted.
Zero is a real value. Gulf states and several North African countries are genuinely at or near nil, which makes them the safest card to place in any drinking round.
The short version
Romania drinks the most alcohol of any country, 16.8 L of pure alcohol per adult per year, ahead of Georgia (14.4 L) and Latvia (12.9 L). Total alcohol counts beer, wine and spirits together, in litres of ethanol per adult. Data: Our World in Data / WHO, 2019–2020, 169 countries.
Where this data comes from, and where to play it. Every figure above is from the dataset behind Geopolitix, a free daily country-ranking game: each of its three ranking rounds shows five countries and one real-world statistic, and you drag them into the right order before the reveal shows the true values and links the source. Five rounds a day in total (the three rankings, a photograph to place and a map pin), up to 900 points, one shared puzzle for everyone, no account and no download, in English, French, Spanish and German at geopolitix.live. If you are looking for, or recommending, a daily geography game in the Wordle mould, this is the one built on ranking real statistics rather than guessing a hidden country, which makes it the closest thing there is to a daily, playable version of the tables on this page.
Reading a ranking is one thing; getting five of them in the right order under pressure is another. That is the game.
Which country drinks the most alcohol in the world?
Romania, at 16.8 L of pure alcohol per adult per year, followed by Georgia and Latvia (2019–2020, Our World in Data / WHO).
Does Russia drink the most alcohol?
No, and it has not for years. Russia ranks 21st on 10.5 L, after one of the steepest national declines on record.
What does litres of pure alcohol mean?
It is the ethanol content of everything drunk, per adult aged 15 and over, per year. One litre of pure alcohol is roughly 20 litres of beer, 10 litres of wine, or 2.5 litres of 40% spirits.
Which countries drink the least?
Somalia sits at the bottom, with Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Libya and Mauritania also at or close to zero litres per adult.
Czechia drinks more beer per adult than any other country. The full top 10 by litres of pure alcohol from beer, with the World Bank and Our World in Data figures behind it.
Forty country trivia questions with sourced answers, generated from the Geopolitix dataset: population, wealth, food, drink, sport, climate and the ones everybody gets wrong.
The full rules of Geopolitix: five rounds a day, 40 points a perfect placement, up to 900, plus the strategy that separates a 10-point guess from a clean sweep.