Sholinganallur, beer capital: every week since we started counting
Rank Chennai's taluks by counted beer sell-through and the league table has been a procession: the same name first, every single week on record. The OMR's taluk doesn't just out-pour the rest of the city — the map of who drinks what turns out to run on geography.
Every week counted, one winner
Since Pulse began counting Chennai shelf-by-shelf in August, the weekly beer leaderboard has returned the same name every time: Sholinganallur first — four weeks out of four, at 85,000 beer bottles in the short opening week and then 1,15,000 and 1,04,000 in the full ones. Over the last ten days of August it moved 1.62 lakh beer bottles, a clear 19% ahead of second-placed Ambattur.
Volume king, not share king — and that's the honest version
Two different crowns here, and Sholinganallur only wears one of them. By volume it is untouchable. By share of its own bottles, beer is 17.9% of what Sholinganallur pours — above the city's 15.7% average, but the taluk that actually skews hardest to beer is Velachery, at 25.1%, with Aminjikarai next at 21.5%. The OMR drinks a lot of beer because it drinks a lot of everything; Velachery is where the fridge takes the biggest slice of the basket.
The brandy belt is real, and it's in the north
Flip the map to brandy share and Chennai splits on a clean north–south line. The northern taluks are brandy country by four bottles in five: Tondiarpet 81.4%, Purasawalkam 80.2%, Thiruvottiyur 79.5%, Perambur 78.6% — all with beer down at 10–13%. The south and the IT corridor run 15–25% beer. You can genuinely guess a shop's fridge-to-shelf ratio from its pincode.
| Taluk | Brandy share | Beer share |
|---|---|---|
| Tondiarpet | 81.4% | 11.4% |
| Purasawalkam | 80.2% | 11.7% |
| Thiruvottiyur | 79.5% | 10.5% |
| Perambur | 78.6% | 12.8% |
| Velachery | — | 25.1% |
One city, two liquids: the north drinks brandy like the delta, the OMR fills fridges like a campus. The border between them is visible from a leaderboard.
How this was measured
Every figure is an estimate derived from stock movement — repeated shelf counts across every reporting TASMAC shop in each of Chennai's 16 taluks, with sales inferred from the drops between counts. The weekly league covers every week since counting began in August 2026; the taluk bars above use 22–31 August, the window with the fullest shop coverage. Four weeks is enough to call a streak, not a season — this page previously ran with early, rougher estimates, and it now carries the counted numbers. The league updates nightly in the app; if Sholinganallur ever loses a week, the app will say so before we do.
Six kilometres of the OMR out-pour every other corner of the city, every week we've counted. The fridge is the IT corridor's real cafeteria.