While trends generally indicate an increased interest and purchasing of premium-priced alcoholic beverages, there is evidence that younger consumers are particularly interested in trading up. Since 2020, the percentage of U.S. adults aged 21 and older who participated in Dry January has increased, with expectations that participation will grow. In December 2023, it was anticipated that 27% of adults aged 21 and older who drank alcohol would be “very likely” to participate in Dry January 2024, and an additional 18% were “somewhat likely” to do so. Of those intending to do so, 46% “rarely drink,” and 41% “drink between one to five alcoholic beverages weekly.”
Cosmetics consumer behavior in the U.S.
The map shows the share of all road traffic deaths attributed to alcohol consumption over the national legal limit for alcohol consumption. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), in its Global Burden of Disease study, provides estimates of the number of deaths attributed to the range of risk factors.5 In the visualization, we see the number of deaths per year attributed to each risk factor. This chart is shown for the global total but can be explored for any country or region using the “Change country or region” toggle.
Historical perspective on alcohol consumption
Pertaining to price, those priced at $15 and above experienced positive growth in sales compared to 2020, with the greatest growth for wines at the $25 and high price tier. In the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, and many European countries, alcohol is responsible for around a third of all traffic deaths. Alcohol use disorder, which includes alcohol dependence, is defined in the WHO’s International Classification of Diseases (available here). Alcohol use disorder (AUD) refers to the drinking of alcohol that causes mental and physical health problems. Again, the prevalence of drinking across North Africa and the Middle East is notably lower than elsewhere. Typically, 5 to 10 percent of adults across these regions drank in the preceding year, and in a number of countries, this was below 5 percent.
Americans spend over $37 billion annually on beer, in part because of pricey craft brewery offerings. Similarly, hard liquor suppliers have enjoyed record sales in recent years, driven by consumer interest in high-end spirits. Even wineries are raking in more revenue than ever, despite uncertain enthusiasm among younger generations. The growth rate for all other varietals reported decreased between 0.9% (Sauvignon how to flush alcohol out of your system in 24 hours blanc) and 16.9% (Sangria). A closer look at the “most popular” white varietal, Chardonnay (nearly 16% of the market share for those reported), and the “most popular” red varietal, Cabernet sauvignon (nearly 14%), revealed that the growth rate for these two decreased by 6.9 and 7.0%, respectively. Other formats that decreased in growth during this period included 500 mL, 1 L, and larger containers.
The charts show global consumption of beer, first in terms of beer as a share of total alcohol consumption, and then the estimated average consumption per person. According to SevenFiftyDaily’s State of Whiskey report, 39% of whiskey drinkers are “between the ages of 21 and 35, and only 17 percent [are] over the age of 55.” While unflavored whiskeys grew by 3% between 2017 and 2022, flavored whiskeys increased by 11% during that period. More recently, for the 52 weeks ending September 2023, flavored whiskey sales grew by 1.9%. One factor contributing to an increased interest in flavored whiskeys has to do with, “in general” they are “going to skew a bit younger,” with some brands noticing an increase in consumers from aged 21 to their mid-30s being “drawn” to the product compared to more mature consumers.
Formats that experienced an increase in growth rate were 300 mL (28.3%), 187 mL (6.2%), 250 mL (5.8%), and other smaller containers. However, the combined market share is significantly lower than the market share of traditional 750 mL and larger containers. As reported in the 2022 Silicon Valley Bank State of the Wine Industry report, data blood alcohol content (bac) depends on provided by SipSource, which “tracks both on- and off-premise sales by volume,” for the period of September 2020 through September 2021, approximately 55% of wine was sold in 750 mL bottles. This was a 3.6% decrease in the growth rate over the previous 12-month period. Furthermore, while multi-cultural consumers (African American, Hispanic, Asian, and Others) accounted for 37% of those of legal drinking age, they accounted for 39% of the beer volume and 41% of the spirits volume consumer, but only for 33% of wine volume consumed. In the chart, we see data across some countries on the share of people with an alcohol use disorder who received treatment.
Statistics
What some suggest should be the fourth category of alcoholic beverages, sales of ready-to-drink (RTD) beverages increased from “7 percent in 2019 to 11 percent for the first half of 2021,” with several sources indicating that the RTD market will continue to grow. In fact, the market share for hard seltzer decreased slightly between 2020 and 2021 due to “increased competition from crossover categories like RTDs.” This interactive map shows the annual average alcohol consumption of alcohol, expressed per person aged 15 years or older. To account for the differences in alcohol content of different alcoholic drinks (e.g., beer, wine, spirits), this is reported in liters of pure alcohol per year.
- Long-run data on alcohol consumption from the United States gives us one perspective of drinking since 1850.
- According to our data, recent decades have seen a definite surge in spending on alcohol, particularly in some places and populations.
- Data indicate that consumers who purchase non-alcoholic products are also purchasing beverages with alcohol, and the percentage is increasing.
- The charts show global consumption of spirits, which are distilled alcoholic drinks, including gin, rum, whisky, tequila, and vodka.
- Here, we see particularly high levels of alcohol abstinence across North Africa and the Middle East.
- With each new year comes a new set of alcohol beverage consumption statistics, trends, and predictions.
Alcoholic beverage preference
When it comes to your health and hard-earned money, it’s certainly an experiment worth trying. There were 11,282 wineries in the U.S. in 2021, of which 16% were categorized as small (5,000-49,999 cases produced annually), 33% very small (1,000 to 4,999 cases), and 48% with “limited production” (less than 1,000 cases). The data produced by third parties and made available by Our World in Data is subject to the license terms from the original third-party authors.
We will always indicate the original source of the data in our documentation, so you should always check the license of any such third-party data before use and redistribution. The total estimated number of deaths by country from 1990 to 2019 is found here. It is possible to switch this data to any other country or region in the world. Data on alcohol expenditure is typically limited to North America, Europe, and Oceania.
N.C. Solutions reported in January 2024 that, on average, consumers were “having three drinks per week, down from four per week in 2023.” Gallup also reported that alcoholic beverage drinkers consumed “on average…four drinks in the past week,” in July 2023. NielsenIQ researchers did find that it was not an “all or nothing” decision regarding non-alcoholic purchases, but rather 78% of those who purchased non-alcoholic beverages also purchased beer, wine, and spirits with an alcoholic beverage content. Consumer data published by Drizly in 2021 revealed that sales for non-alcoholic wine, beer, and spirits “place among Drizly’s fastest-growing subcategories year-over-year” and that “[n]on-alcoholic beer was the platform’s biggest non-alcoholic seller.” Of the three categories, non-alcoholic liquor grew 200% year-over-year. The results in the chart show the increased risk of developing alcohol dependency (we show results for illicit drug dependency in our topic page on drug use) for someone with a given mental health disorder (relative to those without). For example, a value of 3.6 for bipolar disorder indicates that illicit drug dependency became more than three times more likely in individuals with bipolar disorder than those without.
Low and no-alcohol sales and consumption
Other sources indicate that more “lesser-known” European lagers like Belgian lagers, Czech lagers, and German smoked lagers will become prevalent. In an article published by WGSN, we should begin to see Chinese baijiu, a white spirit, “and the world’s most-consumed spirit, outselling whisky, vodka, gin, rum, and tequila combined,” become more prevalent. All visualizations, data, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited. This pattern of drinking is often termed ‘binging,’ where individuals consume large amounts of alcohol within a single session versus small quantities more frequently. American Addiction Centers offers an online calculator that can help you estimate just how much you can save over the course of your lifetime by seeking alcohol addiction treatment now.
The prevalence of alcohol dependence in men is typically higher than in women across all countries. When we look at national averages in this way, there is no distinct relationship between income and alcohol consumption. As shown by clusters of countries (for example, Middle Eastern countries with low alcohol intake but high GDP per capita), we tend to see strong cultural patterns that tend to alter the alpha-pyrrolidinopentiophenone function standard income-consumption relationship we may expect. With the change country feature, it is possible to view the same data for other countries. Sweden, for example, increased the share of wine consumption and, therefore, reduced the share of spirits. By default, the data for France is shown – in recent decades, here, the share of beer consumption increased to make up around a fifth of alcohol consumption in France.