This is the second installment in a two-part Sightlines series about how young legal-drinking age consumers are poised to shape the alcohol industry. Read part one here. Additional coverage and context will be available to Sightlines+ subscribers.
How much alcohol young legal drinking age adults (LDAs) consume today isn’t so far out of lockstep with prior generations. Whether measured by the percentage of people who say they drink or how much Gen Z adds to the total population’s volume of alcohol consumption, levels are consistent. What is vastly different, however, is what types of alcohol those young people are choosing and why.
Today’s drinkers who are just turning 21 can celebrate with more types, flavors, and brands of alcohol than any drinker before them. Companies and brands making hard seltzer, ready-to-drink canned cocktails, and crossover “hard” versions of soft drinks and juices didn’t exist 10 years ago. The non-alcoholic beverage market is also increasingly dynamic, with functional beverages, CBD-infused drinks, premium waters, and pre-made flavored lattes all also vying to alter young drinkers’ mindset and physiology. Given this breadth, young drinkers can afford to be picky—and they are.
More so than older adults, young LDAs alternate between multiple types of beverages categories, choosing a wine for one reason, then a tequila cocktail, then a Light Lager—sometimes all on the same occasion. They’re motivated less by what the beverage is, and more by how it will make them feel, what drinking it says about them as a person, and what flavors it tastes like.
Instead of seeing this confluence of factors as an exciting new path for how people can seek any kind of alcoholic beverage that brings them joy, it’s often confused as a disruption against the status quo. And when that happens, a broader narrative is formed that the youngest millennials and Gen Z in particular have abandoned alcohol rather than recognizing they’re just making decisions every previous generation wasn’t able to consider.
This fluidity is a far cry from the more ingrained category preferences of older generations:
In 2013, for example, Texas college students reported beer (29%) or liquor (24%) to be their preferred types of alcohol, with single-digits selecting wine (9%) and ready-made drinks, like coolers (8%), according to the Texas College Survey of Substance Use, which the state administers to students 18 years and older.
By 2021, the majority of students (32%) said they prefer a combination of types of drinks. (This wasn’t an option until the 2019 survey, a reflection of how recently this norm has changed.)
In 2021, those students who did prefer one type of alcohol were split almost evenly across liquor (23%), beer (17%),ready-made drinks like hard seltzers or canned cocktails (15%), and wine (13%).
Even craft beer drinkers are becoming more varied in their choices. A 2022 survey of regular craft beer drinkers, conducted by the Brewers Association, found that more of those drinkers report also consuming spirits, flavored malt beverages, hard seltzers, ciders, and imported beer weekly than did so in 2019.
The most diverse generation in history has the choice of the most diverse collection of alcohol types in history. What this necessitates from alcohol companies is a concerted effort to understand these drinkers’ needs, preferences, and priorities—not just to sell products to them, but to actively involve them in their development and marketing.
Big alcohol companies have taken note. When Molson Coors announced the upcoming launch of Happy Thursday, a flavored, “spiked refresher”—inspired partially by the “refreshers” lines of non-alcoholic drinks from Starbucks and Dunkin’—the company explicitly drew the connection between flavors and Gen Z.
“Flavor is the number one purchase driver for legal drinking age consumers between 21 and 34-years old,” Jamie Wideman-Rotnicki, Molson Coors’ vice president of innovation, said via email. “Appealing to this audience isn’t just about bold flavors; we also know Happy Thursday needs to be the right combination of taste, sessionability and variety.”
Molson Coors touts how much it has drawn on LDA Gen Z drinkers to inform this launch. That process began with a quantitative study of young consumers between 21 and 26 years old; then, the company formed a “consultant group” from that same demographic to weigh in on packaging design, market strategy, brand events and the “overall brand proposition” of Happy Thursday.
“We wanted to understand who they were, and not the version that the media portray them to be,” says Wideman-Rotnicki.
Time will tell whether Happy Thursday in fact resonates with its target consumers. Connor Blakley, the 24-year-old founder of The DropOut Companies, which launches consumer brands aimed at Gen Z, says marketing anything to this particular demographic is a huge challenge. Gen Z is inherently distrustful of products that large companies tell them they should like. They’re more likely to trust recommendations from friends, celebrities, content creators, or to customize their own products to fit their preferences.
“I don’t think you can sell to Gen Z at all. Traditional ads, the old playbook needs to be completely thrown out,” Blakley says. “If it’s not interesting, funny, doesn’t apply to them, or it’s not authentic, it doesn’t work.”
Young LDAs’ penchant for drinking across categories has come in parallel to another related, but distinct trendline: U.S. consumers’ increasing preference for spirits:
Between 2002 and 2022, servings of beer consumed by U.S. drinkers fell -0.6%.
During that same period, servings of spirits rose +92%.
The reasons are many: the rise of mixology and cocktail culture, the popularity of flavored spirits like Fireball and Crown Royal Peach, and canned cocktails that make spirits easier to consume during occasions where mixing cocktails isn’t feasible. Where beer once dominated college campuses, spirits have moved in.
Most young drinkers today are getting their introduction to alcohol through spirits rather than beer. A Knit survey of 300 evenly split male and female respondents between 21-28-years old, commissioned by Feel Goods (Good Beer Hunting’s parent company), found that liquor (71%) was the type of alcohol that most respondents reported drinking, followed by beer (67%) and wine (55%).
One key outcome of this shift relates to how much alcohol is consumed in terms of plain, old ethanol—not how many individual drinks a person puts away. Consider this:
If a young drinker increasingly chooses spirits today, the ABV of those drinks are higher than a domestic Lager more commonly consumed a decade or more ago.
While that same drinker may consume less total volume—maybe they’re not downing a whole six-pack—they are still consuming amounts of alcohol that in totality are consistent with past generations.
Owen Schrull, manager of Ashebrooke Liquor Outlet in Morgantown, West Virginia, the hometown of West Virginia University, says he’s noticed college students buying more spirits than they did five years ago, whether in prepackaged, ready-to-drink form, or traditional bottles.
“Two weeks ago we got a pallet-and-change of High Noon’s tequila variety pack and a lot of students were getting it. It’s definitely a shift for a lot of people. Even if they can spend less and make a stronger drink that tastes the same, it’s the ease of just cracking open a can,” Schrull says. But social media cocktail-creation content also has spurred young drinkers’ interest in liquor. “TikTok and Instagram Reels have had an impact. I hear things like, ‘This guy I watched made something …’ and they want to replicate it.”
Among young LDA drinkers, cocktails are perceived as offering more customization and personalization than beer. Michael Taylor, a 21-year-old college student in Raleigh, North Carolina, says that he often drinks Light beer, Corona Extra, or Blue Moon because they're cheaper to buy in bulk and share with others. But this year he and his friends are making an effort to expand their interest in mixed drinks and knows by name that he prefers Lunazul tequila or New Amsterdam vodka. If price weren't a consideration, "I'd probably shift more to cocktails," he says.
"There’s a lot more to explore with cocktails, and maybe as you grow older, you shift more away from other alcohol or you have more money.”
Spirits’ ascendancy can’t be understood in isolation, though, as most young LDAs say they drink multiple types of alcohol. Spirits are just one new category of beverages for these curious, savvy drinkers to explore while they’re also seeking flavors and attitudes they like from other products.
So what motivates a young drinker to choose a BuzzBallz Ruby Red Grapefruit one moment, a Montucky Cold Snacks the next, and a Twisted Tea after that? In two words: mood and flavor.
Young LDAs are accustomed from the moment they turn 21 to drinking across different types of alcohol. On the whole, they’re not preferential to one type of base fermentable (wine, beer, spirits) than another. Instead, it’s the flavor of the beverage and how it makes them feel that matters most.
“The mood I’m in is a really big influencer, and there are different moods,” says Stevi Cameron, a 21-year-old college student in Durango, Colorado. “Sometimes I’ll be in a very wine-dominated mood, which would be something where I want to be more comfortable. I’m with people I know; me and my roommates used to do Wine Wednesday and it’s with just our girlfriends, a girl’s night, something like that where I’m just more comfortable and jolly.”
Who young drinkers are with, where they are, and the mood of that interaction are all important cues to a generation that sees drinking as a vehicle for social cohesion and connection. And just like unique occasions with friends, they have an array of flavor experiences from all kinds of alcoholic beverages to match the moment.
“If I’m out with my girlfriend, we split a bottle of wine at dinner, but if I go out with seven or eight of my guy friends, then it’s probably a round of shots,” says Oliver Glavin, a 24-year-old account executive in Brooklyn. “On a given night of going out, it’s the expectation [among my social group] that we’ll match the same level.”
Flavor is also critical. Respondents to the Knit survey commissioned by Feel Goods found drinkers ages 21-28 said flavor was the most important attribute when buying alcohol, followed by freshness and alcohol content. This matches surveys from the Brewers Association, which for years have shown the most important characteristic when choosing craft beer is flavor, and even those craft-drinking regulars are shifting more toward flavor-driven alcohol options beyond beer.
Some beverages—a pinot noir, an IPA, Scotch whiskey—have inherent flavors. But increasingly, young LDAs are choosing alcohol products with added flavors that have little or nothing to do with their base fermentable. Some of the most successful brands among drinkers of all ages, such as BeatBox, Twisted Tea, and High Noon, are beloved for flavors that aren’t derived from their base (wine, beer, and spirits, respectively).
But having flavor alone isn’t enough. The flavor has to work. Blakley says this is where Cacti Agave Spiked Seltzer—a partnership between Anheuser-Busch InBev (ABI) and rapper Travis Scott—failed. Despite a white-hot launch that saw Cacti sell out in thousands of stores and online, the brand was discontinued just nine months later.
“That’s the only thing that failed: It was a terrible product. Every single flavor tasted like shit. It just didn’t hit. All my friends wanted to love it so bad,” Blakley says. “The marketing for Cacti was great but they still failed.”
Because young LDAs tend to move between flavors and types of alcohol at a greater rate than prior generations, they’ve developed a reputation for being fickle or having short attention spans. Blakley says this is a misreading, though: Gen Z isn’t a bunch of brand hoppers just because they’re distractible. Instead, they’re just savvy and have high expectations for the products they buy.
“We’ve grown up in a world full of a constant stream of content since our young adolescence. We just have a really good B.S. meter,” Blakley says. “In a world of unlimited options being thrown in our face, people align the brands they use with themselves and their identity.”
Gen Z draws a strong correlation between the brands they buy, how they perceive themselves, and how they’re perceived by others.
“Whether it’s clothes or the water you drink or the alcohol you drink—this is a terrible shame but our phones act as a mirror for our reality and for ourselves,” Blakley adds.
Amanda Thomas, a 23-year-old junior copywriter in Seattle, agrees that a person’s alcoholic beverage of choice signals something about them.
“In general I feel like people my age are drinking for a personality. There’s a beer girl personality that’s pretty fun and I love meeting beer girls. But there’s also seltzer girls,” she says. “I’m a beer girl. It’s fun, it’s grungy.”
Even though Thomas identifies as a “beer girl,” this doesn’t limit her to only beer. She says she regularly drinks Moscow Mules—she even has the copper mugs at home—as well as red wine. Blakley says that it’s a better personality or identity fit that would make a young person switch brands, not a short attention span.
“It’s less brand hopping and more: You weren’t doing a good enough job engaging your community and someone came in and beat you,” he says. “The only thing that would make you jump is something that would resonate with you more and that you feel better about.”
To get a sense of what would resonate with young LDA drinkers, Molson Coors solicited feedback from them at several stages of the Happy Thursday development process. First, the company conducted a quantitative study among younger consumers between 21 and 26 years old; then, it created a consultant group of those consumers to give input on packaging design, market strategy, brand events as well as the overall proposition of the product.
“New LDA [consumers] often drive trends forward, which makes them critical consumers to speak to and to understand,” Wideman-Rotnicki wrote via email.
Given that Gen Z is the most diverse generation of U.S. drinkers ever—in terms of sexual and gender identity and race and ethnicity—it’s critical that alcohol brands that want to connect to those drinkers understand how deeply their choices are tied to how they want to be perceived. Blakley is skeptical of research panels, surveys, and the like, saying that real understanding comes only through a company’s meaningful empowerment of Gen Z that gives them actual agency over a product from development to launch and beyond. He prefers working with content creators and other Gen Z talent to understand their viewpoints and how they communicate culture to their audiences.
For example, he was skeptical of a number of hard seltzer launches in the past few years that the media speculated might supplant Light Lagers for young drinkers. In his conversations with college-age drinkers, Blakley heard concerns about some hard seltzer’s pricing and taste.
“There were articles coming out when Travis Scott was launching Cacti, like ‘Will Travis Scott’s Cacti replace beer for Gen Z?’ During that time I was fundraising for a beer company [called Bru], I was like, the economy is going to take a turn and Gen Z doesn’t want to pay $23 for a 12-pack of sugar water. It’s a fad,” Blakley says.
He says much of the disconnect between brands and Gen Z comes from corporate decision makers relying too much on surveys and focus groups and not actually living and engaging in the virtual and real-world spaces where Gen Z culture is born. He says the only solution is giving Gen Z marketers and creators power over the process.
“It’s quite literally old people creating shit for young people. Don’t talk about engaging youth culture and young people and not actually embed yourself,” he says. “We can tell when it’s a checkbox on the deliverables at your job.”
This theme is also consistent with how Schrull interacts with young customers at his retail store, where he says now more than ever, college students have “a more fine tuned liking of what they want.”
Given how strongly Gen Z connects personal identity to products, customization is critical to this generation. From custom avatars in the metaverse to multistep coffee orders, Gen Z is used to being able to tailor items to their self conception.
A LendEDU survey of 1,000 Fortnite players published in April found 69% had spent money on in-game purchases to customize their avatars, spending an average of $84.67. (A 2018 study found that 63% of Fortnite players were aged 18-24, though there’s evidence that many younger children are playing Fortnite and may be lying about their ages to do so.) These purchases do not give any competitive advantages, rather, they’re purely aesthetic and reflect how important it is for Fortnite players to reflect their identities, even in a digital world. And last year, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz specifically cited Gen Z’s penchant for customizing frozen drinkers and posting photos of them on social media for boosting the company’s third-quarter earnings.
What does this mean for alcohol brands? Young LDAs expect to find products tailored to them—and they’re willing to mix their own if they don’t: Drinks TikTok or DrinkTok, led by newly LDA Gen Zers, is a Pandora’s box of semi-homemade creations. BORGs—”blackout rage gallons” made with water, alcohol, flavorings, and usually Pedialyte or some other electrolyte solution—alarmed college administrators this spring. But they’re also an example of Gen Z’s penchant for customization and expression: A clever and punny name for one’s BORG creation is as important as the liquid itself.
Taylor, the North Carolina college student, says this creativity and individualization is the impetus for his friends’ interest in mixing drinks at home.
“There's a lot more creativity that you can have and sometimes you can get bored of drinking the same thing. Making a mixed drink could be an opportunity to make something new,” Taylor says. “A lot of time, I’ll see stuff on social media and that can influence our interest in trying new things.”
Given the array of alcohol choices available to today’s newly-21 drinkers—and their willingness to mix their own to suit them—alcohol brands have no room for error with this generation. If something doesn’t resonate with a particular member of Gen Z, they’re not going to waste their time on it. There’s either an alternative product that better reflects their identity and preferences, or they’ll make it themselves—and post it to TikTok.
Words by Kate Bernot