Clinking Beer Mugs Emoji

Two beer mugs clinking mid-toast. 🍻 is the universal digital cheers, approved in Unicode 6.0 in 2010 as U+1F37BU+1F37B CLINKING BEER MUGS. It's distinct from 🍺 (single mug, solo or one-to-one) because the two mugs make it inherently communal. You don't clink alone.

🍻 is the casual counterpart to 🥂 (clinking glasses). Where 🥂 says 'wedding toast,' 🍻 says 'beers after work.' Both mean cheers, but the social register is completely different — pub vs ballroom.

The emoji packs a surprising amount of ritual behind it. The clinking glass tradition is centuries old (though the poison-avoidance origin myth is debunked) and ties 🍻 to one of the most universal human rituals: raising a drink together.

🍻 lives in the Friday-evening layer of social media. It's the emoji of TGIF culture — dropped in group chats, Slack channels, and tweets the second 5pm hits. Buffer's 2025 social-posting data shows 🍻 as one of the top emojis specifically paired with 'TGIF' content alongside 🎉, 🕺, and ☀️.

On Instagram, 🍻 appears in bar photos, brewery visits, tailgate parties, and travel posts from Munich, Brussels, Dublin, Prague. On TikTok, it's a 'beertok' staple — brewery visits, homebrew tutorials, craft flights. On X, it closes sports liveblogs and marks reunion tweets.

In group chats 🍻 is both invitation ('drinks tonight? 🍻') and celebration ('got the job! 🍻'). It signals casual camaraderie rather than formal achievement — where 🥂 congratulates, 🍻 celebrates alongside you. Gaming communities use it as a post-match sign-off between teammates.

Seasonal spike: Oktoberfest (late September through early October) drives 🍻 usage up every year, 6.5 million visitors and 6.5 million liters in 2025 alone.

🍻 was part of the 2010 Unicode 6.0 release, riding the first major standardization wave for international emoji support. Its proposal grouped it with the other beverage emojis — 🍷, 🍺, 🍸, 🍶 — and it was included in Emoji 1.0 when the format was formally standardized in 2015.

The ritual it depicts is much older. Toasting dates at least to Ancient Greece, where drinkers honored the gods during ceremonies, and the Roman Senate decreed in the 1st century AD that Emperor Augustus's health be toasted at every meal. The specific act of clinking glasses, though, is much more recent. Historian Margaret Visser argues that clinking grew popular in 17th-century Venice when glassmakers perfected clear, resonant crystal — drinking vessels finally rang pleasantly when struck together, and that sensory pleasure became part of the ritual.

The internet loves to repeat that clinking started as a medieval poison-prevention measure (sloshing liquid between cups would 'prove' nothing was poisoned). Snopes and Ripley's have both debunked this — people drank from shared vessels in the relevant eras, and the wine sloshing would have wasted more than it proved. The real reason is simpler: clinking adds sound to a ritual that already engaged sight, smell, taste, and touch. It completes the sensory set.

• 🇧🇪
  Belgium (inscribed 2016): 11.COM 10.B.5, Addis Ababa, Nov 30 2016. ~1,500 beers and a multi-fermentation tradition. The first beer culture on the UNESCO Representative List.
• 🇩🇪
  Germany (Reinheitsgebot 1516 to 1993): Original 1516 Bavarian law replaced by federal law in 1993. Strict purity is now a voluntary marketing claim. Multiple UNESCO bids floated but none inscribed.
• 🇨🇿
  Czech Republic (national list, Jan 2025): Beer and brewing culture added to the Czech national list in January 2025 as the explicit prelude to a UNESCO submission. World #1 per-capita drinker since 1993.
• 🇯🇵
  Japan (sake inscribed 2024): Traditional sake culture inscribed on the UNESCO list in late 2024. Sets the precedent that fermented-beverage cultures can succeed without a single 'beer' framing.

1. 2010Approved in Unicode 6.0 as U+1F37B CLINKING BEER MUGS↗
2. 2015Emoji 1.0 published; 🍻 standardized across all major vendors
3. 2016Apple iOS 10 redesigns the beer emojis with more realistic foam physics after years of public ribbing↗
4. 2020Oktoberfest cancelled due to COVID; 🍻 'virtual toast' becomes a video-call ritual on Zoom and FaceTime
5. 2022World Cup Qatar drives a massive global 🍻 spike as group-chat toasts fly across time zones
6. 2024Oktoberfest 189 draws 6.7M visitors and 7M liters of beer, the post-pandemic peak↗
7. 2025Oktoberfest 190 scales back slightly: 6.5M visitors, 6.5M liters. Sober-curious culture finally touches the world's biggest beer festival↗

• •The poison-prevention origin story for clinking glasses is almost certainly false. People drank from shared vessels in the relevant eras, and sloshing wine between cups would waste more than it proved. The actual origin is Venetian crystal making a pleasant ringing sound in the 17th century.
• •The tradition of toasting goes back at least to Ancient Greece and Rome — the Roman Senate in the 1st century AD decreed Emperor Augustus's health be toasted at every meal.
• •Oktoberfest 2024 served 7 million liters of beer across 6.7 million visitors in 16 days. That's enough 🍻 material to post every second for 186 years straight.
• •Germans maintain eye contact during every clink. Breaking eye contact is said to cause 'seven years of bad sex.' Yes, really.
• •In Japan, younger drinkers should clink their glass lower than their seniors' glass — a hierarchy gesture built into the toast. A single 🍻 emoji flattens this distinction.
• •Oktoberfest 2025 was the first on record where per-visitor beer consumption dropped meaningfully (0.97 L/visitor vs 1.04 in 2024) — a signal that the sober-curious movement has reached even the world's biggest beer festival.
• •Beer is the world's third most-consumed beverage after water and tea. 🍻 therefore represents more global consumption than 🍷 and 🥂 combined.
• •Friday social-media engagement is higher than any other day of the week — 25% of video plays, 17% of comments, 16% of likes and shares. 🍻 is the emoji most tightly coupled to that engagement spike.
• •The Czech Republic has been #1 in per-capita beer consumption since 1993 — 32 straight years. 'Na zdraví' is the toast; crossing arms while clinking is traditionally bad luck.
• •The 1516 Reinheitsgebot was formally replaced in 1993 by the Provisional German Beer Law. Strict purity is now a voluntary marketing claim, not a regulation. Most of the law's modern prestige is a 1950s rebranding by Bavarian brewers facing European market integration, not a continuous tradition.
• •Belgian beer culture was inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List on November 30, 2016 (decision 11.COM 10.B.5). Czech beer culture was added to the Czech national heritage list in January 2025 as the public step before chasing the same UNESCO inscription. Germany, with the older Reinheitsgebot, has not reached inscription stage.
• •Anheuser-Busch InBev brewed 495.49 million hectoliters in 2024, about 25% of all beer sold globally. That single Belgian-Brazilian-American conglomerate owns Budweiser, Bud Light, Corona, Stella Artois, Beck's, Hoegaarden, and Leffe, which is a startling fraction of what people picture when they tap 🍻.
• •In 2024 the United States crossed a quiet threshold: more craft breweries closed than opened, the first such year on record. The Brewers Association tally hit 9,796, up from 1,759 in 2010, while per-capita beer consumption drifted from ~27 gallons to ~22 over the same window. More producers, smaller pie.

• •Cheers (1982-93): the entire show is essentially a 🍻 emoji. The theme song premise — 'making your way in the world today takes everything you've got' — is what 🍻 compresses into one glyph.
• •How I Met Your Mother: the Friday 'Suit Up!' / MacLaren's Pub routine made 🍻 the show's unofficial emoji before emojis were in the cultural mainstream.
• •Barstool Sports: built its brand identity on a Friday-🍻 tone. The emoji still anchors most of their X copy.
• •It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: the gang's Paddy's Pub is an iconic 🍻 setting — dysfunctional friendship group, perpetual toasting.
• •World Cup post-match tweets: every winning team's fans drop 🍻 in social posts within seconds of the final whistle. FIFA's 2022 final drove massive emoji-usage spikes globally.

• •🍻 is U+1F37BU+1F37B. Common shortcodes: :beers::beers: (Slack, Discord, GitHub).
• •Emoji 1.0 / Unicode 6.0 — universally supported since 2010. No FE0F variant selector needed.
• •Consider contextual rendering: 🍻 is more celebratory than 🍺, so use it sparingly as a UI icon. For generic 'drinks' or 'bar' features, 🍺 or 🍸 usually read more neutrally.

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