A recent Reuters report suggests that that the ongoing credit crunch is not just impacting on UK beer sales. As you can see from the following summary it is not just us Britons who are not crying into our beers.

France : Sales of French champagne dipped 2.6 percent in the first eight months of the year, according to figures from champagne winegrowers’ committee CIVC.

Gerard Laloi, who heads a group that represents France’s bar owners, said beer sales have been falling since January, with bar beer sales down 12 percent in the first nine months of 2008, compared with the same period a year earlier.

Laloi blamed the decline on a smoking ban that took effect in bars and restaurants on Jan. 1, as well as on the economic downturn.

Germany : Germany’s brewers sold just under 11 billion pints of beer in the first six months of this year — before the crisis took hold, but amid growing economic concern in the wake of the U.S. subprime meltdown. That was a decline of 1.7 percent from the first half of 2007.

The flagging economy is not the only factor in the decline. The German statistics agency said other causes were this summer’s poor weather, new smoking restrictions and price increases driven by rising energy costs and higher costs for hops and malt.

As in other countries, beer consumption in Germany has been falling steadily for more than a decade, a trend that experts have attributed to an increasingly health-conscious public.

USA: In the U.S beer sales are slowing, but still growing, said Benj Steinman, publisher of trade publication Beer Marketer’s Insights. Sales to retailers this year are up about half a percent, he said. That’s down from the 1.4 percent growth rate the beer industry saw last year and 2.1 percent in 2006. But Steinman notes that the industry’s long-term growth rate is about 1 percent a year.

“The beer industry overall is performing surprisingly well given what’s going on,” Steinman said. “It’s just resilient. It’s not recession-proof but it resisted more than many other industries, seemingly.”

Sales of imported beer, though, are down 3 percent, Steinman said, a sign people are curbing their purchases of pricier brews. Micro-brewed beers, which command higher prices, though often not as much as imports, are up slightly this year.