The alcohol industry in the US just finished its worst year since 1991, according to a leading analyst. A cafe/music club that I went to on Saturday night in Florida partly explains why.
Jon Moramarco is a partner and editor of the Gomberg Fredrikson Report, and he crunches a variety of official statistics to give quarterly webinars about the alcohol industry. Tuesday's was especially bleak. Americans are apparently buying less of everything alcoholic except for ready-to-drink cocktails.
"Apparently" is important to add because there are no true national measures of alcohol sales. Moramarco teases out the numbers from statistics from government agencies as well as from major distributors. His main stat on Tuesday was liquor entering distribution – in other words, wines or beers that were sold from producers to distributors.
And those numbers are terrible. Wine entering distribution was down 8.9 percent in 2023. Beer (including once-trendy hard seltzer) was down 5.6 percent. Spirits seem like a bright spot on the surface, but that's because RTD cocktails were up 30.5 percent. Remove all the canned Moscow Mules and traditional spirits like whiskey and vodka were down 9.1 percent.
Moramarco crunches all the distribution numbers and compares them to the population of legal-drinking age adults, and comes up with a measure of "equivalent servings" of alcohol; i.e., 1.5 ounces of spirits equals 5 ounces of wine, etc. By that measure, Americans had fewer servings of alcohol in 2023 than in any year since 1991.
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