This is the first installment in a two-part Sightlines series about how young legal-drinking age consumers are poised to shape the alcohol industry. You can read part two here. Additional coverage and context will be available to Sightlines+ subscribers.
One’s early 20s are so synonymous with coming of age as an alcohol drinker in the U.S. that the link between the two is the foundation for an entire pantheon of entertainment, from “Animal House” to “MTV’s Spring Break.” Yet an overwhelming body of media coverage and research concludes that’s all now in doubt.
Young people who have recently turned 21 are members of Gen Z, the post-millennial cohort that Pew Research Center defines as those born after 1996. And one of the defining characteristics of Gen Z, according to prevailing wisdom, is that they’re just not as interested in alcohol as previous generations. Take your pick of headlines that claim as much:
“Gen Z Is Sober Curious: Why Many Young People Are Rethinking Their Relationship With Alcohol”
“Young Americans more likely to say no to alcohol, study finds”
If this is in fact the case, the alcohol industry should brace itself for near-implosion. Instead, companies all over are just realizing the actual reality: Young legal-drinking-age (LDA) consumers aren’t thumbing their nose at alcohol en masse, rather, they’re drinking differently and with new preferences than past generations.
“My entire friend group and people I know casually from school, we’re going out every weekend,” says Maggie Jensen, 22-year-old college student in Missoula, Montana. She rejects the premise that young people aren’t interested in alcohol, and says that consuming it was normalized among her high school classmates in central Montana even before they were legally able to do so. “I wonder if part of the reason [people] say that is because of the pandemic, and maybe people couldn’t go out as much anymore.”
The true picture of how much Gen Z is drinking is more complicated than the “sober generation” headlines. But it can be clearly understood when considering the context of today’s beverage choices, what this generation chooses to drink, and how they think about all this differently than older drinkers simply because their options are starkly different from what was available 10 years ago. These new patterns—as well as Gen Z’s aversion to traditional advertising and marketing—might make young people seem ambivalent to alcohol. But there is plenty of evidence to show that young people aren’t the teetotalers they’re made out to be.
“The ‘sober’ stuff is mind-blowing to me. That’s like, only a thing in California and New York,” says Connor Blakley, a 24-year-old member of Gen Z who’s tracked his peers as consumers for almost a decade. At 15, he founded a Gen Z-focused marketing agency called YouthLogic; today, he is the founder of The DropOut Companies, which launches consumer brands aimed at Gen Z. “There’s not one person who’s spent more time on college campuses than me in the past three years and there has not been a single time when anyone has held anything non-alc in their hand [at a party].”
To make pronouncements about Gen Z, researchers first need to define it. With 1996 as its starting point, the oldest members of Gen Z are now 27. The cut-off for when Gen Z ends is less defined, but the early 2010s is generally cited as its bookend, meaning many are not yet of legal drinking age. If 2012 is taken as the cutoff, less than half of Gen Z is 21 years old or older. The youngest members of the cohort are 11 years old. To write off a generation as largely uninterested in alcohol before half of them have legally been able to purchase it, and while its youngest members are still in middle school, seems hasty.
Another significant challenge to summarizing Gen Z’s attitude toward alcohol is that the generation is less a monolith than any before it. Demographically, it’s characterized by its diversity:
According to Census Bureau projections that factor in immigration to the U.S., Gen Z will become majority non-white in 2026, when the group will range from 14-29 years old.
Two-thirds of Gen Z people who live in urban counties are racial or ethnic minorities.
A Gallup poll conducted in 2021 found one in five Gen Z adults identifies as LGBTQ.
A July 2021 study by the Williams Institute, a University of California Los Angeles research center, found that 76% of all LGBTQ adults who identify as non-binary are between 18-29 years old.
Because Gen Z is a generation defined by multiple identities, speaking for the entire cohort’s attitudes towards alcohol is nearly impossible. It also ignores the fact that the most diverse generation of Americans that has ever existed gets to choose from the most diverse collection of alcoholic beverages that have ever been available.
“You’ve got these 40-year-old white dudes being like ‘Gen Z this, Gen Z that.’ And even I never claim to speak for all of Gen Z. It’s so diverse, there are so many different subcultures,” says Blakley.
The idea that researchers, pollsters, or the general public can declare Gen Z an entirely sober-minded generation is formed on shaky ground. Gen Z is still very much in the process of coming into its own as consumers and consumers of alcohol, with unique demographics unlike those of prior generations.
As alcohol buyers, no subset of Gen Z will be more critical than women. In 2019, women made up the majority of alcohol consumers under the age of 25—something no previous generation had seen. Women on the whole are achieving parity with men when it comes to alcohol consumption thanks to increasing levels of education, income, and career advancement, all of which are associated with increased alcohol consumption. As Gen Z continues to come of legal drinking age, the average new drinker in the U.S. is increasingly likely to be a non-white woman.
Alcohol companies have not historically considered non-white women to be their defining consumers. The diversity of Gen Z, however, necessitates that these companies abandon past notions of who their core audience is, and not dismiss the power of new consumer groups simply because those weren’t the drinkers who have previously been drawn to them. Businesses’ success will come from meaningfully understanding the preferences and desires of this new, powerful generation—one that’s led by women and non-white consumers.
(Learn more about women’s growing importance as alcohol consumers in this 2022 Sightlines series..)
For every new survey that purports to show upheaval in generational drinking attitudes, the overall rate of alcohol consumption in the U.S. has been remarkably stable in recent decades. Gallup has polled people about this since 1940, and for most of that time—certainly since 1990—roughly two-thirds of U.S. respondents have indicated they drink alcohol at least occasionally. Similarly, per capita consumption of total ethanol tracked by the National Institutes of Health—a way to gauge drinking volumes across beer, wine, and spirits—has averaged 2.3 gallons annually since the end of World War II. That volume matches more recent habits even if isolated to the last 20 years when the average per capita consumption was … 2.3 gallons.
Generation to generation, it can be expected that around 60-something percent of Americans drink some amount of alcohol during any given year, and it will amount to somewhere slightly above two gallons’ worth.
This also appears true of young drinkers:
The Texas College Survey of Substance Use, which the state administers to students 18 years and older, found a similar rate of past-year drinking in 2021, the most recent year for which survey data is available: 65% of responding students said they’d consumed alcohol in the past year.
Beer Marketer’s Insights reported in August that “drinking rates among American adults up to age 30 increased in 2021 and 2022, up from recent lows and back to levels consistently seen from the mid-1990s to about 2016,” citing data from the government-funded, annual Monitoring the Future study.
If generations’ attitudes and behaviors toward alcohol are as starkly different as we’re made to think, we’d have seen much more dramatic shifts and consistent trendlines in both the percentages of U.S. residents who drink and how much they consume. Instead, we see relatively stable percentages over time, with year-to-year variations that normalize in the long term.
What has shifted dramatically is what people drink, with data from the National Institutes of Health showing U.S. drinkers increasingly choose distilled spirits. Since 2001:
Per capita consumption of beer has declined -14%.
Meanwhile, wine has increased +37.5%.
Spirits have increased +58%.
Young LDAs do, on many surveys and polls, report lower levels of drinking today than in decades past. There are several ways to explain these discrepancies, but perhaps most critical is the gap between wellness aspiration and reality that defines Gen Z.
More than any generation prior, Gen Z has grown up with a wealth of information about the physical and mental health risks of drinking. These don’t only come from cringey public service ads anymore, but from the health and wellness influencers and personalities who are Gen Z’s most trusted voices on these topics. Being perceived as healthy, balanced, and mindful are top priorities for this generation—but that doesn’t necessarily preclude drinking or other indulgences.
According to data from the Beverage Marketing Corporation, 64% of legal drinking-age college students report drinking at least once per week and consuming more than one drink. Of that group:
39% report consuming between five to eight drinks in a typical single setting.
35% say they have three to four drinks.
25% consume one to two drinks.
Blakley mentions the growing trends towards what he calls “holistic health,” which includes physical, mental, and emotional health. Gen Z routinely reports holistic health and wellness to be important to them, but again, they’re willing to make room for alcohol within that framework. He describes a generation that believes “work hard, play hard” is part of health, and that thinks alcohol consumption is something that can be optimized and, in a sense, de-risked. He mentions the influence of podcaster Joe Rogan’s annual Sober October campaign, which advocates for temporary abstinence rather than complete disavowal of alcohol.
“We’re shifting instead of watching dumb Logan Paul videos to asking: What does Andrew Huberman say about the science of, if I’m going to drink twice a week, should I drink water before I do?” Blakley says. (Essentially, Blakley is describing how Gen Z will look to their perceived experts not for messages about complete sobriety, but for ways to soften the effects of the drinking they already plan to do.) “It’s that, ‘Hey, I’m going to keep my routine for six days out of the week and I’m going to work out and sauna and read and take care of myself, but on Friday and Saturday night, I’m going to get hammered.”
That approach might seem contradictory, but health and wellness have never been as rigid for Gen Z as they might seem to older adults used to a food pyramid’s rules or quantitative Body Mass Index readings. To younger adults, wellness is compatible with indulgence: Ypulse’s 2022 What Is Wellness? trend report found that 76% of Millennials and Gen Z respondents agreed that “Wellness can be anything that makes you feel good.” (See also: self-care.) The report summarizes: “Where traditional health magazines and journals may have pushed a single narrative of the ‘right way’ to be healthy, young people are now looking to each other for the kind of advice they want—the kind that suits their imperfect lifestyle and widening definition of wellness.”
A 21-year-old woman described this attitude to consulting firm Ernst & Young’s 2022 Gen Z Wellness Study: “I think with vapes or a cigarette or alcohol or cannabis, if you’re doing it for a good purpose, go ahead. Don’t be addicted to it and don’t make it a reason to kill your organs.”
That ‘imperfect lifestyle’ means that like generations before them, young drinkers today have aspirations that they don’t always live up to. While they report a focus on health and wellness, those definitions are mutable, and on the whole, they’re forgiving of minor lapses or exceptions to the general rule. The Beverage Marketing Corporation’s 2023 report, “The Gen Z & College Student Beverage Consumer” found 47% of young people surveyed said they don’t look at nutrition labels on beverages.
Stevi Cameron, a 21-year-old college student in Durango, Colorado, agrees that there is a portion of her generation “focusing on their health and being disciplined.” She counts herself among those, noting that she doesn’t want to drink too much because she’s “at a point where I like being productive in the mornings.” Despite having that goal, Cameron does still drink with her friends.
“If I’m going to drink, I want to enjoy it. I don’t want it to be something I regret later,” she says. “Obviously that’s not always the case—I wish that I was perfect with that and could discipline myself every time.”
Michael Taylor, a 21-year-old college student in Raleigh, North Carolina, expresses a similar sentiment. He’s accepted that alcohol use can be harmful to one’s health, but that understanding doesn’t preclude him from drinking the majority of nights of the week.
“I think like anything, drinking in moderation is not unhealthy as long as you’re keeping it in moderation. I would consider one-to-two drinks on a weeknight keeping it in moderation,” Taylor says. “I feel like I have a positive relationship with alcohol. It’s never caused any problems in my life. As a young person, we see lots of warnings about the negative effects of alcohol, so obviously I’m very aware of certain experiences and how alcohol can be a hindrance to your health in general.”
This expansive definition of wellness as more of an orientation than a rigid practice is critical to complicating the narrative around Gen Z’s relationship to alcohol. This is a generation that values health in all forms, yet also finds denial itself to be unhealthy. If wellness is “anything that makes you feel good,” that can include dessert and a few glasses of wine on a Friday night, followed by a gym session the next afternoon.
Words by Kate Bernot