AtlasIceland1 on record

Iceland

Northern Europe

Iceland banned beer stronger than 2.25% until 1 March 1989, long after spirits and wine were legal again, on the reasoning that beer was cheap enough to encourage everyday drinking. The country still marks the anniversary as Bjordagur, Beer Day, which makes Icelandic brewing younger than most of the people doing it.

Beers on record

Brewing since

1989

PlateIceland1 town

Fig. 2. Circle area is beers on record for that town. Labels appear as room allows, so zooming in reveals towns rather than enlarging them. Only towns whose coordinates could be sourced are drawn, so an unmarked town means a missing coordinate rather than a town without beer. Tiles from OpenFreeMap and OpenMapTiles, data from OpenStreetMap.

Towns as a table1

Towns in Iceland with beers on record
Town	Beers
Reykjavik	1

Styles here

Pale Lager1

On the recordcounted from 1 beer

The record here

Breweries1
Towns1
Styles1

Oldest brewery with a sourced year: Olgerdin Egill Skallagrimsson, 1913.

These are facts about this record, not about the world. They are counted from the beers on file, and the atlas is only as deep as its sources: 74% of everything it holds is American or Dutch, because that is what the bulk import reached, not because that is where beer is. So the styles most often recorded in Iceland are not necessarily the ones most often brewed there, and a country with few beers here has a thin record rather than a thin brewing scene.

1 beer

Gull

Reykjavik, Iceland