Beer drinking in America falls to the lowest level in a generation
Beer drinking in America falls to the lowest level in a generation
The boycott of Bud Light was just one factor in a year of industry-wide declines.
Here is the key sentence in the article.
...an acceleration in the long-term decline of so-called domestic-premium brands, which include Bud Light and rivals Miller Light and Coors Light...
So, are people drinking less beer or are they drinking less piss beer? Could it be that people are having two Hazy Imperial IPA's with 8+ ABV instead of a six pack of Coors Light? I am taking this headline with a grain of salt.
EDIT: I found my glasses.
beer shipments
That’s the problem. A lot of people are living in and around cities now. We buy beer at the brewery. Do these figures include 1st party sells? Distributors have always been a necessary evil and many states have laws saying you must go through a distributor for selling elsewhere, but many breweries are just doing taprooms now to not have to deal with that. I’d like to see those stats if they exist.
I do understand that many people are buying seltzers now, myself included.
I also wonder how liquor sales are as well.
My wife and I are obviously only one couple, so this is confirmation bias, but alcohol in general just isn't as appealing anymore. With all this general stress we've been going through (struggling with inflation, insane work hours, insane work conditions) alcohol is causing more migraines, sucky morning-after-drinking symptoms, high calories, expensive prices, there's just no good reason to drink as much as we used to. And it's not like we drank that much earlier in our lives as well.
Tie this all together with marijuana availability which has none of these cons except for high taxes, then alcohol doesn't sound as appealing anymore.
The beer fests near me are filled with selzers, ciders and stuff like mead. As someone who doesn't like beer, I think it's a positive change to have alternatives for different tastes.
I think beer is gross, personally, so this isn't a post about me but reading the comments it is interesting to see beer drinkers here decide against it due to cost and wanting other choices. I have news for you guys there are cocktails and other great alcohols that cost as much as your 7 to 10 dollar beer and they taste fucking great.
That's weird to learn given how many small breweries there are in my city all of a sudden.
Yet even as overall volume consumption declined, the largest beer makers remain financially resilient thanks to prices that climbed alongside — or even surpassed — broader inflation, Steinman said. Beer drinkers also continued to shift toward more expensive beer brands, especially imports like Modelo Especial, which became the No. 1 beer in America in 2023.
So people aren't willing to pay higher prices for worse product.
I drink IPAz when I only want to have 2 drinks instead of 10.
Turns out, that's most of the time
I find it hard to believe that the idiot Republicans who boycotted Bud Light stopped drinking beer entirely.
Beer drinkers have diversified
Tap water probably got drinkable so no need to buy it in bottles or cans
As someone who rarely drinks and fucking hates being around dumb drunk fucks.
Good.
Keep going, don't stop, fuck alcohol.
David Nutt knew what was up. He argued alcohol and tobacco should be illegal and marijuana, LSD, and mushrooms should be legal, based on real-world harm (he also had the data to back it up). He got shitcanned for suggesting this.
Humanity needs to wake the fuck up to how fucking bad alcohol is for us as a species.
Not for lack of effort on my part.
There was a while when everything was watery beer, Bud Light, Coors etc. Then there was a sort of golden era, with lots of variety and lots of companies. There was certainly a good bit of crap, but the huge variety meant that there was always something good to drink. Now we've gone back to consolidation, with only two companies in the entire world, and only one kind of beer: poorly done IPAs. Monopolies are bad for consumers. No one wants to buy this piss.
Anecdotally, I and many of my friends are way more likely to purchase liquor than beer. Personally it's just too much liquid for me, especially because I still want to be drinking water alongside the booze.
Lets make America great again - have a beer!
Same happened in Japan.
I'm going to credit Dylan Mulvaney for this improvement in American social discourse. People boycotting bud light has been amazing for beer consumption.
Lower beer consumption means lower community violence. These things take time to recognize, let's start planning Dylan's parade for say....2026? Plenty of time to make it fabulous.
For every beer yall don't drink, I'm going to drink 3. 1 because I want a beer, 1 for the beer you passed on, and 1 to make the beer industry even more awesome.
