America is seesawing between sobriety and boozing it up

When a new year rolls around, social circles split into two groups. The dividing line: alcohol. There are the people doing Dry January, swearing off booze for the month to regroup after the holiday season's indulgence. Then there are the people who have no plans to shift gears — if anything, they're excited that all the January teetotaling means smaller bar crowds. But increasingly, the sober/drinking split is stretching beyond the confines of January into other months and across American culture.

The conversation around sobriety and sober curiosity has become louder and more open in recent years. Whereas 20 years ago a decision to abstain from alcohol was often kept hush-hush (the implication being that the abstainer had a shameful problem), nowadays people are much more open about sitting drinking out. They're skipping happy hours, going on booze-free dates, and laying out their reasoning for sobriety online. The beverage industry has been happy to cater to them, too. IWSR, which covers the alcoholic-beverage industry, said volume in the nonalcohol segment in the US grew by 29% in 2023, driven by young people in particular.

Before everyone does a victory lap about how America's given up on alcohol, it's important to note that the nonalcohol segment is still pretty small — IWSR expects it to make up 4% of the overall alcoholic-beverages market by 2027. And while the modern temperance movement is growing, so too is the high-alcohol-content segment. Americans are increasingly opting for spirits over beer, and ready-to-drink cocktails and high-ABV beers are becoming more popular than middle-of-the-road options.

Polling from Gallup suggests men, white people, college graduates, and higher-income people are among those with a higher propensity to drink. And heavy drinkers consume the bulk of alcohol volume in the US. But many drinkers are incorporating nonalcoholic options into their routines without giving up on booze altogether. They're looking at occasional abstention as a form of moderation. After all, per the market-research firm NIQ, more than 93% of nonalcohol buyers also buy alcoholic drinks.

"The people who are drinking a lot of NA stuff, they just are interested in more flavors and more beverage profiles and things like that," said Dave Infante, a contributing editor and columnist at VinePair who writes a Substack about drinking called Fingers. "So they're just drinking more interesting shit out of everything."

To some extent, drinking culture is moving toward the extremes. Sure, more people are abstaining on a given night — but when people do order an alcoholic drink, they're really going for it. They're getting an old-fashioned, not dialing down to a light beer or two. Instead of forgoing the real thing altogether, Negroni lovers are mixing in a phony Negroni from time to time.

The surgeon general's recent warning that alcohol can cause cancer reiterated for a lot of people something they already (begrudgingly) knew: Drinking is not good for you. The proportion of Americans who say drinking is bad for health has risen quite steadily over the past two decades, per Gallup, even if the amount they drink hasn't changed much. The polling also suggests that the proportion of Americans who consume alcohol has for decades remained relatively stable, at about six in 10. Per-capita consumption of ethanol from alcoholic beverages has stayed at about 2 to 2.5 gallons.

"There's just a lot of evidence that suggests even though we have more alternatives than ever, people are still happy to consume and indulge in something, especially if they feel they can do it responsibly," said Bryan Roth, the director of insights at Sightlines, an analyst group that covers the alcohol industry.

For some people, drinking responsibly means strategically turning alcohol time on and off — sometimes throughout the year or week, sometimes just in a night — and moderating without giving up the bottle entirely. They think it's healthier, even if their doctor might not entirely agree. It's a way to slow down, to get a check on how much they're drinking. And sometimes they just can't afford to be too hungover ahead of a big workday.

"If all people who were buying Athletic beers and Bud Zeros were 100% sober, that would be one thing, but what we find is a good majority of people are sort of mixing and matching," said Nadine Sarwat, an analyst who covers the beverage and cannabis industries at Bernstein.

Some people set rules for themselves about when alcohol is allowed. They eschew alcohol on weekdays and leave it only for the weekends — so they'll drink alcoholic beer on a Friday but a nonalcoholic beer at lunch on a Wednesday. Or they'll replace that bottle of cabernet with a 0% option a few nights a week to take it easy. Some drinkers take part in Damp January and reduce their alcohol intake instead of going totally dry. Or there are those who attempt a harder and longer reset with the "75 Hard" challenge, which says no alcohol (or cheat meals, or, seemingly, fun) for 75 days. (There's a "75 Soft" for those who want some semblance of joy.)

Day to day, at the bar or a party, some drinkers are doing what's been dubbed "zebra striping," where they alternate between alcoholic and nonalcoholic beverages — a Manhattan one round and a mocktail the next. It's a more festive — albeit expensive — tactic than chugging a glass of water between drinks. In other instances, they incorporate "bookending," where they begin and end the night with an NA option. Or they go NA for the "fourth quarter," finishing off the night with a few alcohol-free drinks, emulating what stadiums do toward the end of sporting events.

"It then becomes a method of pacing so you can just kind of maintain," said Joaquín Simó, the global brand ambassador and mixologist for On the Rocks Cocktails. "What I am hearing anecdotally a lot more too is just people who are like, 'Yeah, I know I have to tone it down, but I don't want to give it up entirely. So I'm doing this as a means of dipping my toes not necessarily into sobriety but more into temperance.'"

Kaleigh Theriault, an associate director of beverage-alcohol thought leadership at NIQ, said that while nonalcoholic options appeal to people of many ages in many locations, higher-income people tend to favor them. Even as young people drink less overall and look for more ways to have booze-free fun, many are still imbibing. That NA IPA is combined with an 8% IPA that will knock their socks off.

"What we see with Gen Z is they want non-alc, but they also want those high-ABV beers as well," she said.

But the strongest indicator that someone will be into an NA option is that they're also an alcohol drinker, or at least a buyer. (Some proportion of NA purchasers are probably buying for parties and gatherings for other people to drink.) That many NA drinkers would also be alcohol drinkers tracks. If you don't really have a taste for alcohol, you might spring for a fun mocktail from time to time, but you may also just go with a Diet Coke, which you like better, has fewer calories, and is cheaper. And if you've never been a beer drinker, you're probably not jazzed about downing an NA one.

"No one likes the taste of beer when they first drink it," Sarwat said. "I think that's a universal truth."

For people who have given up drinking, NA options can be appealing, especially as the offerings get better in stores and at restaurants and bars. But as Laura Silverman, the founder of Zero Proof Nation, which is dedicated to the NA-beverage industry, told me, some people who have experienced problem drinking may opt to steer clear of them as they work on their sobriety.

"For people who have had problems with alcohol, many doctors and psychiatrists and stuff, they recommend not going down the path of some of these nonalcoholic beverages because they can be triggering for some people," she said. "I think it's completely individualized."

There's also a divide in the types of nonalcoholic beverages people are consuming — some categories are doing better than others. Most of the analysts and people in the industry I talked to for this story said NA beer was pretty good and close enough to the real thing price-wise that it's compelling to swap in. Many were not so bullish about wine and cocktails — Simó said that besides the sparkling options, most NA wine was "not good," and he described NA distillates as "hot trash." Silverman was more optimistic about the taste and price points.

"Where we were before, everything was sort of premium because it was the only thing that was available," Silverman said. "Not everything has an exorbitant price point anymore, but there is a wide range, and some things are quite expensive."

On the whole, Americans aren't drinking markedly less than they were in the past, but they are drinking differently. Some of the divides and distinctions are complicated to parse.

Gallup has found that while young people report drinking less than previous generations did, older people report drinking more. Gen Z is, for now, straighter-edged than the generations before them in terms of alcohol, but that doesn't necessarily amount to "the kids will be saints forever." With marijuana legal in so many states, some may be opting for cannabis products instead. Drinking is a social activity, and as young people socialize less, they skip out on imbibing, too. Many Gen Zers are still under the legal drinking age, and their consumption habits might change once they're not breaking the law. Roth, from Sightlines, told me that so far, as Gen Zers hit 21, they appear to be drinking about the same amount millennials did when they got into their 20s.

"What we see younger people do in terms of their attitudes toward drinking is very in line with how adults are shifting their attitudes and thought processes toward it as well," Roth said. "It's just a greater understanding of how it impacts you."

Consumers have more options now for drinking than ever. A lot of those options are concentrated at the bottom and at the top, with a sort of hollowing out of the middle. Instead of a 4.2% ABV Bud Light, they're going for a 0% Athletic or a 9% Voodoo Ranger IPA. Or they're swapping a six-pack of Miller Lite for a martini that really packs a punch.

"Demand is gravitating either to the high end of the ABV spectrum or the zero-ABV spectrum," Infante said.

Meanwhile, younger and older generations alike are thinking about their habits and choices — maybe never drinking, or maybe opting in sometimes and out others.

"We do see this broader trend of moderation happening across the industry," Theriault said.

In the ideal, healthiest world, Americans would probably give up on drinking, perhaps except for the most special occasions (and even the surgeon general would likely say that's a no-no). We'd also have a perfectly balanced diet of fiber and proteins and get in those 10,000 steps a day plus strength training and eight hours of sleep. But we do not live in the ideal, healthiest world; we live in the real one, where drinking is not going to "poof!" disappear. Part-time sober — or mindful drinking or whatever you want to call it — might be the best some people can do, or are at least willing to do, right now. And in an alcohol market that's increasingly split between super sober and hella boozy, it's an understandable impulse. That lunchtime beer was never a good idea anyway — let alone the lunchtime martini. Swap it out for a Heineken 0.0 or a mocktail, and leave the good stuff for Friday night.

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.