Peak booze: Alcohol consumption may be in terminal decline

By David Fickling

Without noticing it, humanity has passed a remarkable milestone: Alcohol consumption has gone into possibly permanent decline.

That’s a turning point in a habit at least as old as civilization itself. For millennia, we’ve used drinking to loosen our inhibitions at social gatherings, anesthetize ourselves from the drudgery of life, or simply give a little sparkle to our days. The fact that we’re giving it up without even noticing is a sign of how other long-standing practices — from smoking and sexual promiscuity to eating red meat — might dwindle just as painlessly.

It’s impossible to know whether an activity is truly going out of fashion until years after the fact. Shifts in our consumption can be mysterious, and hard to predict. As any hiker would recognize, it can be all too easy to think you’re at the peak long before you actually get there.

Such transitions do happen, however. Production of grape wine hit its maximum level of 37.5 million metric tons — equivalent to about 50 billion bottles — as far back as 1979, and has since fallen by about 27 per cent. Decades of advocacy for the claimed health benefits of a daily glass of shiraz have failed to turn that picture around. We appear to have hit a shallower peak in beer, too. The world is now about 2.6 per cent below where it was in 2016, when 190 million tons was brewed, or roughly half a trillion standard bottles.

Take in spirits and other alcoholic drinks and the picture is even more sober. The IWSR, a London-based market research firm for the global beverage industry, has witnessed a dramatic fall in per-capita drinking in recent years, from 5 liters (170 ounces) of pure alcohol per adult per year in 2013, to 3.9 liters in 2023.Plug demographic data into those numbers, and it looks like our thirst peaked in 2016 at 25.4 billion liters, from where it’s fallen about 13 per cent.

“The story has been one of progressive moderation at a macro level for a very, very long time,” says Richard Halstead, head of consumer insights at the IWSR. “You have a generational shift going on between older consumers who drank relatively cheap stuff habitually with meals, and people in their 20s and 30s who are very much event driven.”

More recent developments have accelerated those trends. The greater diversity of non-alcoholic alternatives and the increasing availability of marijuana and other soft drugs have made it easier for people to abstain. The Covid-19 pandemic pushed things still further, focusing attention on health and encouraging a style of socializing that’s more intentional and less focused on just getting drunk.

The great hope of every vice that appears to be peaking is demographics. The world’s population just recently crossed 8 billion, but it won’t reach a ceiling until it hits around 10.3 billion in the 2080s, according to the United Nations. In theory, that should provide an ample supply of new drinkers.

That may be an overoptimistic assumption, though, because the hardest-drinking parts of the world have already had their demographic booms. Map out the region from Africa to Southeast Asia that will account for almost all population growth over the rest of this century, and you’re looking at a picture of the larger Muslim world (that includes places like India and Nigeria, home to some of the largest Muslim populations). This is unlikely to be a strong market for the world’s brewers, even as rising incomes give locals more opportunities to slake their thirsts.

In India, even non-Muslim religious groups often abstain, while a long-standing temperance movement means alcohol consumption is banned altogether in several states. Some of the fastest-growing Christian sects in developing countries are also non-drinkers, such as the Latter-Day Saints and Seventh-Day Adventists.

Put all that together, and it’s not hard to argue that we’ve already passed peak booze. Should long-term alcohol consumption fall ultimately to 3.1 liters per adult, per year, then the world will never again regain the 25.4 billion liter level we hit in 2015. That’s not at all implausible: It’s equivalent to roughly six standard drinks per adult per week, or significantly more when you consider that billions of teetotalers are factored into the raw average.

That will represent a monumental moment for humanity, whose rise has been intertwined with booze since deep in prehistory. The earliest evidence of alcohol consumption comes from the Raqefet cave in Israel, where the paleolithic Natufian culture left remnants of fermented grains about 13,000 years ago. The Natufians’ habit of collecting and eating wild grass seeds may have been a crucial step in the domestication of cereal crops, allowing humanity to settle in cities for the first time. That suggests civilization itself could be a by-product of beer consumption, rather than the other way around. 

Since then, drinking is likely to have grown almost every year, in line with the human population. The only real exceptions would be periods like the medieval plagues, when the sheer death toll may have been sufficient to reverse the unstoppable forward stagger of alcohol. 

Hitting this turning point may seem like grim news for the world’s drinks companies, but there’s a silver lining. Consider the way microbreweries, boutique distilleries and dimly-lit bars have proliferated in recent decades, where people think nothing of paying more for a cocktail than they would for a square meal.

As we consume fewer units of alcohol, we may still spend more on it, upgrading out habits to more premium liquors to match our wealthier lifestyles. The world may be sobering up — but it’s not abandoning the bottle, just yet.