Three out of five adults (60%) in the U.S. drink alcoholic beverages, according to a July poll from the analytics and advisory company Gallup, Inc.
While the number appears down compared to Gallup’s 2019 results, which reported 65% of American adults consume alcohol, the results have a +/-5% margin of error, suggesting that consumption has not changed much year-over-year (YOY).
“This 2021 number is — in a statistical context — no different between 2019 to 2021,” Lester Jones, chief economist of the National Beer Wholesalers Association (NBWA), told Brewbound.
“Despite the pandemic, despite changes and where and how and what we’re drinking, we still, as a population and aggregate, are stable consumers and predictable consumers on average,” he continued. “We just change what and where we drink.”
“Ignore the YOY changes,” Bart Watson, chief economist for the Brewers Association (BA), wrote on Twitter. “Plug the new data points into your long-term trends spreadsheet.”
Since the 1990s, at least 60% of adults surveyed by Gallup have reported consuming alcohol, with the exception of 2020, in which Gallup did not measure consumption due to COVID-19-related lockdowns.
For its 2021 poll, Gallup conducted telephone interviews with 1,007 adults ages 18 and older to determine what consumers were drinking, and how often. Similar polls have been conducted by Gallup since 1939.
The average number of drinks consumed in the past seven days dropped slightly more than in recent years, from four drinks in 2019 to 3.6 drinks in 2021. However, Jones said to take the numbers with a grain of salt. The survey includes adults who said they drink alcoholic beverages in general, but did not in the past week (the survey was conducted from July 6-21, 2021). Jones noted that while data points based on one week may fluctuate, overall Americans tend to drink about 2.5 gallons per year.
What consumers are drinking is also relatively unchanged. Despite increases in beyond beer consumption, beer is still the most popular alcoholic beverage of choice for 39% of respondents, ahead of wine (31%) and liquor (27%).
Nevertheless, liquor has continued to bridge the gap in preference with beer, steadily increasing since 2016. Beer (45%) and liquor (30%) are the most popular alcoholic beverages with younger drinkers, ages 18 to 24. The gap between the two is the biggest with drinkers ages 35 to 54, with 42% drinking beer most often and 27% drinking liquor.
Where beer is still lagging is with women. Although 54% of men surveyed said they prefer beer over liquor (28%) and wine (15%), only 23% of women said they prefer beer. Wine is preferred by nearly half of women drinkers surveyed (49%), followed by liquor (26%).
“Beer has got to break through that and have females embrace beer equally,” Jones said. “And not just through hard seltzers, but through the traditional malt beverages.”
For now, industry data experts emphasize that the latest Gallup survey should not be used as the only indicator of consumption trends.
What is certain, as Watson wrote on Twitter, is that economists still have some job security.
“If everyone started interpreting stats correctly and writing reasonable headlines, there would be no need for people like us to do analysis and fact check them!” he wrote to Jones.