American beer drinking falls to lowest level in 24 years

One brewing industry bigwig called 2023 ‘a five-alarm fire’ for the beer trade

The worst affected company was Bud Light maker Anheuser Busch, which faced a conservative boycott over transgender rights (Bruno Coelho/Getty Images)

Americans' consumption of alcoholic beer has fallen to its lowest level since 1999, according to a new industry report.

Beer Marketers' Insights (BMI), which tracks beverage sales across the US, said that beer shipments had fallen by 5 per cent in the first nine months of 2023 and were on track to finish the year below 200 million.

That would be the lowest level of beer consumption in America since 1999, despite the country's population growing by roughly 23 per cent in that time.

"The year 2023 proved perhaps the most disruptive, shocking and profoundly unsettling year in [our] 54 years of covering the industry, across multiple dimensions", said BMI.

Speaking to NBC News, the company's executive editor David Steinman put it more succinctly: "It was a tough year for beer."

The worst-hit company was Anheuser Busch, the maker of Bud Light, which faced a conservative boycott last year over its promotional partnership with the transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney.

But most of the decline came from longer-term trends such as the falling popularity of American "premium" brands such as Coors Light and the end of the past decade's hard seltzer boom.

Americans have also been drinking less alcohol overall. A Gallup poll in 2021 found that the average number of drinks per week had fallen from 4.8 to 3.6 since 2009, while the number of respondents who said they ever drank was down from 65 per cent to 50 per cent.

This appears to be especially true of young people, with the number of college students who said they abstained from alcohol rising from 20 per cent to 28 per cent between 2002 and 2018.

Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal reported that many consumers have been switching to other types of alcoholic drinks such as canned cocktails – or to cannabis, which is now legal in more US states than ever before.

"This is an industry-wide, five-alarm fire," beer industry don Craig Purser reportedly told a wholesalers' convention in October.

Nevertheless, Mr Steinman told NBC that big beer brewers were still in good financial health thanks to rising prices and a consumer shift towards more expensive, often imported drinks.