Beer Consumption Down by 20%: Could College Binge Drinking?

It seems America is no longer the beer-guzzling culture that it once was.

Gallup's new alcoholic preferences survey, summed up in the image above, finds that beer's lead over wine has slipped by 20 percentage points since the early 1990s. But the demographic breakdown is even more brutal. Young drinkers and nonwhite drinkers saw the steepest falls in beer preference. In other words, the fastest-growing segments of the country are also running the fastest away from brews.  

Well I think part of the change is that many young drinkers have been brought up in a culture where the harder stuff gets them drunk faster and for less so that is what they go for. Their paychecks are stretched pretty thin already (if they even have one) with student loan debt and the Great Recession so they want more drunk for their bucks. They just don't want to drink like 5 Bud Lights anymore to get them the same buzzed as they would a few Vodka and Red Bulls. They are used to shots of Vodka and not cans of Bud Light (the hipster love of .

You also add to the fact that craft beers/European beers taste about10x better than anything that Budweiser makes and you can see beer consumption drop. I could not see someone going back to Bud Light after drinking nearly any German beer.

I have to agree with this article when it says that liquor ads are what is driving some of the move away from beer as well. They usually have an air of the badass for men (Michael Imperioli as the spokesman for 1800 Tequila) or are part of the rap culture (Diddy for Ciroq) which is important to younger drinkers. Most non-craft/non-European beers just don't have the cultural cache of a Jack Daniels or a Patron so that might be part of the decline.