India is the world’s biggest consumer of whisky. A staggering 1.6 billion bottles were drunk there in 2017, compared with a relatively miserly 468 million bottles in the United States. That means that Indians consume nearly half of all the whisky produced throughout the world.

India, of course, has a population of 1.2 billion: but its vast appetite for whisky is not accounted for by population size alone. China, for instance, has about 100 million more mouths to feed, but the Chinese thirst for whisky still only amounts to about 19 million bottles.