Trump famously claims he's never had a glass of alcohol but...and this is going to probably shock some of you...he may have been deceitful.
posted by NervousVarun at 12:38 PM on October 1 [8 favorites]

Count on Republicans to give not drinking alcohol a bad name.
posted by JHarris at 12:41 PM on October 1 [9 favorites]

I¡¯m not going to fully disagree with the conclusions here, but also ¡­ beer has gotten stupid expensive. A six-pack of domestic swill should cost $6. It¡¯s $9 or $10 now. Even the reliable suitcase of Bud, which used to be like $16, is $25 around here.

People are broke. Beer is a luxury. They mention the aluminum tariffs here without fully exploring the concomitant price increase for all beer.
posted by uncleozzy at 12:52 PM on October 1 [19 favorites]

Anecdotally, microbreweries in Republican mainstay Tennessee appear to be going like gangbusters.
posted by infinitewindow at 12:59 PM on October 1 [1 favorite]

....Maybe Hulk Hogan's beer just sucked.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 1:08 PM on October 1 [6 favorites]

Hulk Hogan's beer did suck. But given what I know about the beer world - it's a combination of things like the rise of seltzers and RTD cocktails (which are stupid expensive), the health concerns around drinking and to Uncle Ozzy's point - the holy hellish expense that beer is along with other foodstuffs.

And if you give, even me the beer guy, a choice between eating or having a beer - those eggs are way more important. (I can also speak from the beer end that craft breweries are getting absolutely squeezed with inflation impacts on ingredients and packaging.)

I also think this is part of a cycle.
posted by drewbage1847 at 1:13 PM on October 1 [5 favorites]

Beware of trend articles. The article talks about self-reported trends but doesn't have actual sales data. And prices matter, but over the last decade, beer prices have gone up less than overall prices.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 1:18 PM on October 1 [8 favorites]

If it takes downing a beer in public to ensure people don't think I'm MAGA, well, I'm going to just have to suck it up and order another then

Not that I am complaining.
posted by caution live frogs at 1:21 PM on October 1 [18 favorites]

cheers to that
posted by j_curiouser at 1:30 PM on October 1 [5 favorites]

If the Beer Institute is to be believed, beer shipments across the first 8 months of 2025 are way, way down - 7.5M barrels (232.5M gallons/880.8M liters) - compared to the first 8 months of 2024, which was also a down year.

The summer season, which is usually peak beer sales, has also been incredibly soft.

But to make it clear that this isn't just a beer thing - the premium whiskey market has also gotten completely hammered for many of the same reasons (plus the loss of foreign markets). So many smaller whiskey brands are being discontinued and the big owners like Diageo are stopping new plant and barrel barn builds and suspending operations at places like Dickel.
posted by drewbage1847 at 1:30 PM on October 1 [6 favorites]

I wonder if it's mostly reversion to the mean post-COVID....
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MRTSSM4453USN
2022-2024 retail alcohol sales look like they are flattening out, but probably still above what you would expect from extending the trends from before 2019.
posted by kaibutsu at 1:36 PM on October 1 [4 favorites]

Ctrl-F Brett Kavanaugh?
posted by splitpeasoup at 1:38 PM on October 1 [1 favorite]

Ctrl-F Brett Kavanaugh?

God I hate that stupid privileged rapist motherfucker.
posted by Gadarene at 1:41 PM on October 1 [28 favorites]

I think I've still got all my homebrewing equipment tucked away in a closet...maybe I'll leave that out of my "cleaning out unused stuff" efforts.
posted by Greg_Ace at 1:52 PM on October 1 [4 favorites]

This is an interesting li'l article, but since my understanding is that the youth as a whole are drinking less booze, it feels like there¡¯s space here for something much bigger. The whole ¡°Hulk Hogan is a kind of a metaphor¡± just seems forced.
posted by Going To Maine at 1:59 PM on October 1 [1 favorite]

The one problem with the "youth are drinking less" bit is that's largely built around self-reported polls which are notoriously unreliable.

But shipping trends do show a reduction to pre-COVID levels of drinking, which isn't a terrible thing.
posted by drewbage1847 at 2:05 PM on October 1 [5 favorites]

Maybe this story is ops to associate uncool MAGAs with sobriety and lure back those teetotalin' kids?
posted by emjaybee at 2:11 PM on October 1 [1 favorite]

It's all the beer that Canada's not importing
posted by scruss at 2:20 PM on October 1 [4 favorites]

anecdata: the youth are drinking less

visible through volunteering at a youth center and knowing a lot of youngsters from pool night
posted by j_curiouser at 2:20 PM on October 1 [4 favorites]

And beer has carbs! Culture war conservatives have been pushing low-carb diets pretty hard for the last decade. (They might call if buff-he-man-liver-eater-diet or whatever, but it's just another variation of an "eat less sugar" diet.) I was very low carb for a couple of years in my youth, and let me tell you, beer was top of my list for not-worth-it carbs.

In general, it's hard for me to appreciate the "teetotaling Republicans" thing because I grew up in the Southeast in the 90s, where Christian Evangelicalism+Republican Voting+Abstaining from Alcohol all went together. It doesn't feel worthy of notice, though maybe it's different in other regions.
posted by grandiloquiet at 2:28 PM on October 1 [5 favorites]

The graph on this page from the Brewer's Association suggests that craft beer had a huge surge in the 2013-2015 time frame, that largely maintained through a decline 2019-2020, and it's been kinda gently waning since.

I live in wine country (Sonoma County, CA), and there's been much handwringing over the decline in wine sales, which seems to be related to a decline in alcohol sales generally. Which the article acknowledges

So, yeah, if craft beer exploded at the expense of mass market beer, and alcohol's falling out of favor generally, sure, aluminum and Bud Light hate might be some of it, but I bet it's sobriety and/or cannabis that's really to blame.
posted by straw at 2:29 PM on October 1 [5 favorites]

Well, on one level beer makes you sentimental, and the last thing you want when you¡¯ve dedicated yourself to destroying people's lives and sending them off to die where you don¡¯t have to see it is to actually feel anything.
posted by jamjam at 2:30 PM on October 1 [3 favorites]

They mention the aluminum tariffs here without fully exploring the concomitant price increase for all beer.

75 percent of America's supply of aluminum is imported from Canada.

With a 50 percent tariff/sales tax on aluminum from Canada, your frosty can of beer is going to be more expensive because of people who directly or indirectly put Trump in office.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 2:30 PM on October 1 [10 favorites]

Like, I don't know if the glass industry is paying off Trump, but aluminum is sourced from Canada because of their supply of hydroelectricity. America can't just build new dams overnight, no matter what fantasies Trump and his direct/indirect supporters believe. Enjoy that jelly donut, I guess.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 2:32 PM on October 1 [3 favorites]

Now I'm even more sorry that so many craft beer brands have moved from glass bottles to aluminum cans.
posted by Greg_Ace at 2:32 PM on October 1 [3 favorites]

if the puriteens aren't fuckin, they're probably not drinkin' either.
posted by seanmpuckett at 3:00 PM on October 1 [5 favorites]

The kids today are vaping K-pop instead or so I understand. I love beer and especially craft beer but here in NC there are WAY WAY too many breweries. It¡¯s wild to me that banks will still give out loans for something we don¡¯t need more of.
posted by caviar2d2 at 3:00 PM on October 1 [1 favorite]

Now I'm even more sorry that so many craft beer brands have moved from glass bottles to aluminum cans.

I think that's just following consumer trends, even if it is going to lead to higher costs. Here in Canada, our oldest independent brewery, founded in 1867 is closing their bottling line and moving exclusively to cans because glass bottles just aren't selling well anymore. And that's not even one of the craft brands that have increasingly moved toward tall boys.
posted by asnider at 3:04 PM on October 1 [5 favorites]

There¡¯s also some evidence that has seeped into the public consciousness that drinking alcohol is bad for you. That, the rise in THC drinks, means that I know a LOT of people who don¡¯t drink at all anymore.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 3:18 PM on October 1 [7 favorites]

caviar2d2: " I love beer and especially craft beer but here in NC there are WAY WAY too many breweries"

In our war-ravaged hellscape that is Portland, the closure of so many brewpubs in the last few years post-covid has been called Brewpocalypse. It's been the consequence of a stew of people's changing habits (both younger people not drinking as much and just a lot of folks generally not going out as much), escalating costs even pre-Trump, and now those aluminum tariffs plus even higher escalating costs for everything. I know in my experience at least, it's just generally cheaper to drink at home, and "going out" is reserved for a special occasion, as opposed to our pre-covid "it's Tuesday and we're bored, let's go to the bar".

Add that to the fact that Portland was also in the "too many breweries" boat - there was an entire bar here devoted to mead! I don't care how much you like mead, that makes no business sense! - and a certain amount of market correction was always gonna happen. It's particularly brutal here because the market was also oversaturated, but it's also been heartbreaking to see a lot of long-time players in the brewpub scene here fall away as a consequence.

There are still good craft beers to be found, there just aren't as many - and the barriers to seeing new ones coming on the scene are a lot higher now.
posted by pdb at 3:19 PM on October 1 [5 favorites]

Maybe a heck of a lot of that craft beer was just terrible.

As a long time beer consumer, that had been my takeaway since the heady 90's.
posted by djseafood at 3:29 PM on October 1 [3 favorites]

"Half of adults age 18 to 34 do not consume alcohol" - my family is evidence for this.

I do wonder about the rise of legal cannabis as a factor.
posted by doctornemo at 3:43 PM on October 1 [6 favorites]

Maybe a heck of a lot of that craft beer was just terrible.

This. And then they try to hide the terrible beer by dosing it with mega-amounts of hops. To each their own, for sure, but when literally 80-90% of available beers are IPAs and similar styles, other choices are even more limited.

/rant over for now
posted by Greg_Ace at 4:11 PM on October 1 [8 favorites]

Yes, I mean, I like hops! But I also like other things.
posted by inexorably_forward at 4:25 PM on October 1 [2 favorites]

I work at the BCLDB. That's the BC Liquor Distribution Branch, which controls most sales of alcohol in British Columbia. It's run by the provincial government, and I work at the massive LDB distribution centre. It supplies most of the booze in BC, other than the huge beer companies, so I have a pretty good idea what's happening with booze here.
Sales are flat. We had a huge spike during 2020 when Covid hit but in the last few years growth has been sluggish, and we are down in sales and profit.
The economy is a huge thing, the relentless gouging as well which started with Covid and supply chain issues but has been kept up by private industry, and the fact that young people are no longer drinking like they did in previous generations. That's a biggie for us, the fact that 20 somethings no longer drink the same amounts, and also prefer other intoxicants, like edibles, etc.
Me, my favourite intoxicant these days is 8 hours of sleep, but I digress.
It's a massive shift in the culture of alcohol, and my own guess is that it's probably going to be a permanent shift as well, especially in light of some recent warnings from medical science that the best approach to alcohol is total abstinence.
posted by Phlegmco(tm) at 4:26 PM on October 1 [15 favorites]

It's funny, because I (mostly a non-drinker) was just thinking about how it would be nice to open a small bar if fiscally possible (it's probably not), but then I was like, "God, what if a bunch of assholes show up?" But it sounds like they're opting out!
posted by kittens for breakfast at 5:07 PM on October 1 [3 favorites]

I consider it an irony once removed that hops and marijuana are closely related:

Research has shown that Humulus lupulus (the plant that makes hops) and Cannabis sativa (also called hemp and marijuana) are closely related,[1][a] and it may be possible to create novel cultivars of hops that express valuable chemicals similar to commercial hemp. Both hops and cannabis contain terpenes and terpenoids; tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) is a terpenoid.[3][4] Hops lack the enzyme that could convert cannabigerolic acid into THC or CBD,[5] but it could be inserted using genetic engineering as was done in 2019 for yeast.[6][7]

I¡¯d give pretty long odds that there are ¡­ shall we say 'unpublicized' greenhouses and associated brew labs in hospitable locations where transgenic hop plants that express genes for THC, cannibidiol, and perhaps other cannabinoids in various combinations, have already made their way into beers sampled by a select few which are now waiting for their cue to burst upon the global stage.
posted by jamjam at 5:49 PM on October 1 [2 favorites]

I do think a lot of people prefer the effects of THC to alcohol when both are equally available. THC also comes in more form factors, which makes it easier to sneak into places or consume on the street, and probably just gives it a wider appeal. You can¡¯t practically vape or eat alcohol.

We¡¯ve also made it harder and harder for young people to access and consume booze. ID checks are stricter and stricter, no adult wants to be in the news for buying beer for teens at 7/11 or letting their kids¡¯ friends drink in the basement before they wreck their cars, and most parents no longer have a liquor cabinet to raid. If teens can get their hands on liquor, there seem to be fewer places for them to drink it.

Also, the bar scene in many places is still dominated by Gen X and millennials. Bars that had 22-year-olds as customers twenty years ago now have 42-year-olds as customers. Breweries for various cultural and legal reasons are full of families with kids and close early. And from what I remember, 20-somethings are willing to drink in a bar with people their grandparents¡¯ age, but generally not people their parents¡¯ age.

So you have a substance people know is unhealthy and get less experience with in their formative years, and it¡¯s increasingly associated with middle-aged people and getting more expensive, especially in bars, clubs, and music venues. But who knows, this could be totally cyclical and today¡¯s millennial dives will fill up with Gen Alpha kids in a decade, and the generations will join together in asking the AI jukebox to generate them a White Stripes/Tupac mashup while they sip THC-infused old fashioneds.
posted by smelendez at 6:37 PM on October 1 [11 favorites]

I guess I'm weird because I would rather relax with one or two glasses of beer over a one or two drags on a vape or a joint. Pot just puts me straight to sleep!
posted by drewbage1847 at 6:40 PM on October 1 [2 favorites]

who knows, this could be totally cyclical

As has been the case, to some degree, with absinthe.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 7:14 PM on October 1 [1 favorite]

Considering that alcoholic fermentation has existed as a culinary technology for over 10,000 years, and likely predates bread, I'm not quite ready to write off beer just yet.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 7:51 PM on October 1 [7 favorites]

I did not yet look at TFA other than the briefest glance, but I suspect "MAGA war on beer" is not what's going on here. The same story is going on with bourbon, which did not have any lightning-rod endorsement deals going.

It's not just in the US. I hear wine sales are down in France.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 9:11 PM on October 1 [4 favorites]

This article doesn¡¯t seem complete - it¡¯s very light on data *and* relevant quotes or anecdotes. I¡¯m not just going to ¡°trust me bro¡± on conservative men going teetotal.
posted by Selena777 at 11:34 PM on October 1 [5 favorites]

It's not just in the US. I hear wine sales are down in France.

To the best I'm able to figure on a quick research expedition, the 2025 forecast in Portugal is similarly negative, but it's more down to a confluence of economic pressures than a sudden change in consumer sentiment, which (at least up to the paywall) is the story the article in the OP seems to be framing in the US.

2024 seems to have been a relatively great year, with increases in volume domestically and abroad, but declining prices perhaps due to a bumper harvest that left an unsold grape surplus. In 2025 American tariffs will doubtless affect the export market, although frankly I could in theory see less-expensive (though also less well-known) Portuguese wines actually benefitting in the US relative to other, pricier imports. The vineyards are projected to produce less this year, but that is at least in part a reaction to market saturation last year.

I for one, will continue doing my share to support this vital industry.
posted by gelfin at 4:03 AM on October 2 [1 favorite]

I was talking to a local craft brewer awhile ago, and they related that they couldn¡¯t produce a couple of their most popular brews anymore because the only source for the particular strain of barley they used in them was Ukraine.
posted by Thorzdad at 4:19 AM on October 2

Conservative war on beer? I just assumed conservatives were busy with cocaine given the vast number of times Donnie Jr is photographed/filmed in PUBLIC sticking his finer in his mouth and poking around in there.
posted by Gyre,Gimble,Wabe, Esq. at 6:57 AM on October 2

"Half of adults age 18 to 34 do not consume alcohol" - my family is evidence for this.

I do wonder about the rise of legal cannabis as a factor.

My simplistic explanation is that most people have less Fun Money, period, and given the rising cost of alcohol, budgets are being adjusted. Weed is the only thing that has gotten cheaper in the past few years (in my area, anyway).
posted by Dark Messiah at 10:42 AM on October 2 [1 favorite]

The government of Scotland is scattered shirtless of what tariffs are going to do the three scotch whisky industry. Which is hurting these days anyway, except for Diageo which owns half the industry and uses it to make Johnny Walker.
posted by Hactar at 12:30 PM on October 2 [1 favorite]

"anecdata: the youth are drinking less"

Two out of my three kids (all in their 30s) hardly drink at all - we're taking "small glass of wine at Christmas" amounts - while the third will have a beer with me. They tell me that this is quite typical of their friends. And they've never been interested in drugs or smoking either, so I guess they're just healthier than their old man.
posted by 43rdAnd9th at 1:37 PM on October 2

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