Lighter drinking takes a year-round hold

Dry January may be over, but folks in the beverage industry expect the trend toward temperance to continue. Retailers and consumer product makers are busily studying the reasons behind the movement, which is especially strong among younger consumers. One interesting nuance is that full sobriety isn’t necessarily the goal.

According to recent polling from the market research firm Gallup, the number of US adults who drink alcohol has been steady at about 60% since 1939. But self-reported overindulgence has been declining since the late 1980s. Respondents cite health concerns as a major factor in the shift, and that conversation intensified in January when outgoing US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory describing links between alcohol consumption and seven types of cancer.

Darryl Collins, owner of the Baltimore nonalcoholic (NA) bottle shop Hopscotch, says some customers are avoiding alcohol entirely, but most are mixing it up—an NA cocktail here, a low-alcohol beer there, maybe a glass of regular wine. People are integrating NA choices into their social routines, he says, far more than they’re eschewing intoxicants entirely.

And the target market is open to other forms of tweaked consciousness. Cannabis-infused beverages had a presence at the recent Mindful Drinking Fest in Washington, DC, and many of the NA spirits on the market include herbal and fungal ingredients with mood-altering effects, a category the NA world calls “functional drinks.”

C&EN has long had its eye on unusual potables, as these past installments of our Newscripts column show: