Is Not Drinking Alcohol Becoming The New Cool?
Sales and consumption of non-alcoholic alternatives to beer and liquor are soaring, especially among young adults.
This past November, Kirstin Vracko and her husband Yura opened a shop in Seattle that sells non-alcoholic beer, wine and spirits — only. No booze. They called it Cheeky and Dry.
Yura had gone rehab for alcoholism last year. When he emerged in May, Kirstin joined him in going on the wagon. Searching for alternatives to alcohol, she said she discovered there weren't any stores selling non-alcoholic beverages in their area that had much to offer. She talked to a friend who owned just such a store in Virginia.
"The longer I talked to her the more I realized there was really something here," she told me. "There needed to be a shop here. I wanted to support my husband's way of life and mine. We just felt there was a niche in Seattle and people would come."
They found a vacant space in the Capitol Hill neighborhood and rented it. Before it opened, they imagined a quiet little store where they could relax between sales on the couch they installed in the store. They hired no employees. If it went well, they figured daily sales would be around $1,500. Instead, they have been slammed.
"It's insanity," Kirstin told me last week by phone. "From the time we open our doors to the time we tell people it's time to close up. It's constantly busy."
Yura and Kirstin Vracko
The day before we spoke, she said, they had 128 sales with an average of $75 per sale. That's around $9,600. She said that on a rare slow day they till rack of $2,500 in sales. In the two months they've been open, they've had several $15,000 days.
There are now three employees to help them handle the demand. That couch hasn't gotten a lot of use.
The growth of alcohol-free products has come as sales of regular beer, wine and spirits have stagnated or even declined slightly. From October 2022 through September 2023, sales of non-alcoholic beer, wine and spirits in the U.S. increased 32% to a little over $500 million, according to figures cited by USA Today. Leading the way is non-alcoholic beer (legally, it can have up to 0.4% alcohol and still be considered non-alcoholic), which makes up 97% of sales.
"On a percentage change basis, NA beer has been the leader for the past five years," says Bump Williams, a 30-year veteran beverage industry consultant. Sure, that's a tiny fraction of total alcohol sales ($67.6 billion) but the trend line is pointing in one direction. Up.
In the U.S., it all started more than 30 years ago when two of the major American beer producers debuted non-alcoholic beers or malt beverages. In late 1989, Miller Brewing introduced a non-alcoholic brew called Sharp's and backed it with a $8 million to $10 million ad campaign with the slogan: Keep Your Edge.
In early 1990, Anheuser Busch launched O'Doul's with a promoting with the line "O'Doul's for Every O'Ccasion." A Los Angeles Times article about the new beverages said the companies were targeting 24-to-35-year-old male beer drinkers who wanted a safe alternative to drink at business lunches.
The problem was they didn't taste much like beer, making it a tough sell to beer drinkers. And the whole notion of drinking ersatz beer did not have a very good public image, through no fault of their own.
"The NA segment just had a bad reputation of being, 'That's for alcoholics. They don't drink it for enjoyment. They drink it because they have no other choice," Williams said.
In 2017, Heineken, the Dutch beer maker and major player in the global beer industry, went big in America with its 0.0 (as in, no alcohol) brand. Non-alcoholic beers were already popular in Europe. Heineken was betting they could be here too. That meant convincing people it was cool.
"When Heineken came over they glamorized it. They talked about responsibility. They talked about health and wellness," explained Williams, "They opened the eyes of this new generation of consumers that said, 'You know what, I don't really like alcohol. I don't like to lose control. I like to feel good in the morning.'"
They also smartly decided to sell it in the same iconic green bottle as Heineken. Even the label is virtually identical. Heineken 0.0 was a huge success.
That same year, Athletic Non-Alcoholic Beer - an independent brand that started in Stratford, Connecticut - came on the market and was an even bigger hit.
"I never thought of non-alcoholic beer except to make fun of non-alcoholic beer," Bill Shufelt, one of Athletic Brewery's co-founders, told GQ. "Until I was actually looking to drink good non-alcoholic beer."
"It turns out over 30 percent of people (in the U.S.) don't drink at all, and almost 60 percent of people barely drink," he added. "That's a ton of money left on the table, so the economic opportunity was obvious to me."
The flood gates of alcohol-free suds were opened.
It helped that what I had once derided as "fake beer" had gotten so much better. The new products tasted amazingly similar to the real thing and even came in many of the same varieties as real beer: lagers, IPAs, hazy IPAs, etc. Perhaps just as important, there was a market eager for it: young people far more attuned to healthy living than prior generations were receptive. Not all young adults, by any means. Maybe not most. But enough.
SNIPP, a global marketing firm, wrote, “Gen Z has been given the distinction of being ‘the least alcohol consuming generation in history,’ leading a trend toward moderation as part of a broad-based interest in health and wellness… Manufacturers are taking heed.”
"The younger generation are the ones who came in and are most enthusiastic," Williams said. "They say, 'Thank you, we've been looking for this. We need this. We want this.'"
photo credit: Sam Howzit
A Gallup poll last August found that 41% of 18-to-34 year-olds said they totally abstain from alcohol. For 35-to-54-year-olds the figure was 34%, and 38% for those 55 and over.
“If you weren’t drinking five years ago, people wondered, 'What's the sad story behind that?’” said John DeBary, the former bar director for a chain of hipster restaurants in Manhattan, two years ago. “Now people say, ‘Oh, wow, good for you.’”
DeBary left that job to start his own line of botanical drinks made with herbs and fruits that are marketed as alternatives to alcohol.
While zero-proof beer has taken off, the wine and spirits sectors of the non-alcoholic beverage sector still lag. Yes, they’re growing but much more slowly. Like the early versions of NA beer, they just don’t taste anything like their alcohol-containing brethren.
On Amazon, I found a number of extremely negative reviews, including this one about an NA whiskey that will go unidentified here:
"THIS WAS ABSOLUTELY THE WORST TAKING THING I HAVE EVER CONSUMED IN MY ENTIRE LIFE. IT WAS HORRIBLE."
Vracko says there are some high-end non-alcoholic wines that are actually quite nice, but as you go down in price, they tend to taste, as she puts it, “thin.”
I asked Bump Williams if there’s still a risk that the whole non-alcoholic craze may turn out to be fad. He conceded that’s always a risk, but thinks not. This trend appears much bigger than Dry January and Sober October. It sure looks like the allure of tippling without toppling is here to stay and grow — all year.
Cheers!
I find this fascinating. Less booze, less sex, fewer children. I hope they’re at least happy.
I don't drink it enough to actually buy it. But one of the mock white wines one of my non-drinking friends always offers is called Freixenet Espumoso. It's lovely but I don't know if it's available outside of Spain. For beer, I like FreDam but mostly because I'm one of those unlucky souls who can't tolerate gluten and it's 'sin-sin', sin alcohol and sin gluten.