Beer Mug Emoji

A mug of beer, golden-amber lager with a frothy white head. Approved in Unicode 6.0 in 2010 as U+1F37AU+1F37A BEER MUG, it's the most casual of the alcohol emojis, the one you send when you're settling in, not celebrating.

Beer is the world's third most consumed beverage after water and tea and makes up roughly 46% of all alcohol consumed globally. That volume shows up in the emoji. 🍺 is the stand-in for 'I'm at the bar,' 'game starts soon,' 'finally 5pm,' and 'let's catch up' in one character.

🍺 is single-serving. 🍻 is two mugs clinking. Keep the pair straight and you rarely send the wrong vibe.

🍺 is used in three dominant contexts. First, the end-of-day exhale: 'Finally Friday 🍺' or 'First beer of vacation 🍺' — solo mood posts. Second, low-pressure social: 'Grab a beer?' is the classic soft-date invitation, read as testing-ground casual rather than a formal date. Third, sports and live events, where 🍺⚽ and 🍺🏈 show up on every big match day.

Platform patterns: TikTok skews toward craft-beer content and 'beertok' (homebrew tutorials, brewery visits), Instagram skews toward lifestyle shots ('beer and a sunset'), X/Twitter skews toward liveblog sports commentary. LinkedIn uses 🍺 more than 🍷 because 'grab a beer' carries less class signaling than 'grab a glass of wine.'

The Oktoberfest season (September-October) spikes 🍺 and 🍻 usage globally. Oktoberfest draws ~6 million visitors a year and brands use 🍺🥨🇩🇪 as the reliable seasonal combo.

🍺 was part of the 2010 Unicode 6.0 batch that first standardized emoji for international use. It was proposed in 2007 alongside the other beverage symbols and released globally in 2015 as part of Emoji 1.0.

Every major vendor draws it as a straight-sided mug of golden lager with a pale foam head — Apple's version is the glossiest, Google's is the simplest, Samsung's tends toward cartoon, Microsoft's is the squarest. Apple's early beer emoji got a famous ribbing on Twitter for its physically impossible foam geometry (the bubbles floated awkwardly above the liquid). Apple quietly fixed it in a later iOS update; the current version looks like a reasonable pint.

The emoji is officially named BEER MUG despite looking more like a pint glass on some platforms. Unicode uses 'mug' generically — the visual varies by vendor, but the meaning is constant: beer, casual, social.

• 📜
  1293 / 1351 / 1434: Earlier German municipal beer ordinances in [Nuremberg, Erfurt, and Weißensee](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinheitsgebot) all predate 1516. The Bavarian law was a consolidation, not an invention. The 'oldest food law' headline mostly survives because the older ones were city ordinances rather than ducal decrees.
• 🇩🇪
  1871: national rollout: When Bavaria joined the new German Empire, it required the Reinheitsgebot to apply nationally as a condition of joining. Beer purity was politically load-bearing for German unification.
• ⚖️
  1987: ECJ challenge: The European Court of Justice [struck down the Reinheitsgebot's import restrictions](https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2016/04/500-year-anniversary-of-the-bavarian-beer-purity-law-of-1516-reinheitsgebot/), ruling Germany couldn't block imports of beer brewed with rice, corn, or sugar. The law's protectionist edge was filed off.
• 🍺
  1993: replaced: The original 1516 statute was formally replaced by the Vorläufiges deutsches Biergesetz (Provisional German Beer Law). Most consumers never heard about the swap. The label 'brewed according to the Reinheitsgebot' is now a [voluntary marketing claim](https://homebrewersassociation.org/homebrew-community-culture/reinheitsgebot/), not a legal requirement.
• 🎂
  2016: 500-year party: Germany held a national 500th-anniversary celebration. Munich's [special exhibition](https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2016/04/500-year-anniversary-of-the-bavarian-beer-purity-law-of-1516-reinheitsgebot/) drew international press. The same year, UNESCO inscribed Belgian, not German, beer culture on its heritage list.

1. 2010Approved in Unicode 6.0 as U+1F37A BEER MUG↗
2. 2011Apple's early iOS 5 beer design released with famously awkward foam floating above the liquid↗
3. 2015Emoji 1.0 published; 🍺 standardized across all major platforms
4. 2016iOS 10 redesign fixes Apple's foam physics and adds the glossy, frosted-glass aesthetic that's largely unchanged today↗
5. 2020Pandemic drives 'virtual beer' Zoom call behavior; 🍺 becomes a common stand-in in video-chat backgrounds and invite messages
6. 2024US craft beer sees first year since 2005 where closures outpace openings (529 closed, 430 opened)↗
7. 2025Sober-curious movement hits a record: 49% of Americans say they're trying to drink less — yet 🍺 usage in social posts stays roughly stable↗

• 🇧🇪
  Belgium, inscribed 2016: Decision [11.COM 10.B.5](https://ich.unesco.org/en/decisions/11.COM/10.B.5). The dossier covered 1,500+ styles, brewing as a community ritual, monastic Trappist breweries, beer pairing with food, and the nationwide habit of carrying a glass shaped specifically for each beer. It is one of the most successful UNESCO bids any food-and-drink tradition has run.
• 🇨🇿
  Czechia, listed nationally 2025: The Czech Culture Ministry [added Czech beer culture](https://www.expats.cz/czech-news/article/beer-culture-listed-among-czech-intangible-heritage) to its national intangible heritage register in January 2025. National listing is the precondition for a UNESCO bid. The Czech Beer and Malt Association is open about wanting the international stamp.
• 🇩🇪
  Germany, no formal bid: Despite the 500-year Reinheitsgebot anniversary in 2016, Germany has not submitted beer culture to UNESCO. The 1987 ECJ ruling that opened German shelves to imported non-Reinheitsgebot beer makes a 'pure tradition' bid politically delicate.
• 🇮🇪
  Ireland's pub, on the list: Belgium has the beer; Ireland has the [traditional pub](https://stories.kuleuven.be/en/stories/belgian-beer-culture-identity-on-tap), under a different submission path. Different objects, same idea: the social architecture of drinking gets the recognition, not the drink.

• •Beer is the third most consumed beverage on Earth, after water and tea. Nothing alcoholic comes close.
• •The Czech Republic has been #1 in per-capita beer consumption for 32 consecutive years since 1993, drinking 148.8 liters per person in 2024. That's almost four pints a week every week of the year for everyone alive, including babies.
• •Apple's original beer emoji drew years of mockery for its physically impossible floating foam. It was quietly fixed in iOS 10 and nobody on the design team has publicly taken credit.
• •Oktoberfest draws about 6 million visitors per year, which reliably spikes 🍺 and 🍻 usage across every major platform for 16 days in September–October.
• •About 46% of all alcohol consumed globally is beer — more than spirits (37%) and wine (17%) combined. 🍺 is doing the representative heavy lifting for the world's favorite alcoholic drink.
• •AB InBev (Budweiser, Stella Artois, Corona) controls over 25% of global beer volume. One company is most of the 🍺.
• •US craft beer hit a historic inflection in 2024: 529 breweries closed vs 430 openings — the first closures-beat-openings year since 2005, ending a two-decade craft boom.
• •Non-alcoholic beer purchases jumped +22% in the 12 months ending November 2024. 🍺 is increasingly used for 0.0% content — the visual hasn't caught up.
• •The emoji is officially named 'Beer Mug' but the shape varies: Apple renders a straight-sided glass mug, Google a handled stein, Samsung a cartoon tankard. Same codepoint, different vibes.

• •Cheers (1982-93): the sitcom turned 'a place where everybody knows your name' into cultural shorthand. 🍺 is the emoji descendant of that exact feeling.
• •'The Most Interesting Man in the World': Dos Equis's 2006-2018 ad campaign redefined beer as aspirational-ironic. The meme vocabulary survived the campaign and still colors how 🍺 reads online.
• •It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: the gang at Paddy's made 🍺 a signifier for 'we're up to no good' long before the sigma-male 🍷 era.
• •Barstool Sports: a whole media brand built on 'beers with the boys' culture. 🍺 is their de facto tone marker on X.
• •Ted Lasso pub scenes: revived the British-pub 🍺 aesthetic for a global streaming audience and pushed 🍺 into 'warm workplace' territory.

• •🍺 is U+1F37AU+1F37A. Common shortcodes: :beer::beer: (Slack, Discord, GitHub).
• •Emoji 1.0 / Unicode 6.0 — universally supported since 2010. No FE0F variant selector needed.
• •Visual rendering varies more across platforms than most food emojis: Apple uses a frosted glass mug, Google a handled stein, Samsung a cartoon tankard. Same codepoint, different vibes — keep that in mind if you use it as a UI icon across platforms.

See the full Emoji Developer Tools guide for regex patterns, encoding helpers, and more.