What happens when Americans stop drinking?
Across the country, sales of wine, beer and liquor, by volume, have been steadily decreasing: in 2023 falling 3 percent over the previous year; in 2025, 5 percent. I.W.S.R., the British research firm that ran these numbers, anticipates an 18 percent drop over the next decade. Data from the beer industry show the craft brewing work force in decline.
Employment metrics are just part of a calculus that counts consequences to ecosystems that are dependent on the habits that have fueled human fellowship for most of recorded time. From the birth of the public house in the 16th century to the revolution for gay rights, which began at the Stonewall Inn, alcohol has shaped the social politics of urban life. In tandem with new restaurants over the past 15 to 20 years, taprooms have drawn people to once sparsely populated downtowns. This was true of Angel City Brewery in the Los Angeles Arts District, which closed in April. Regulars mourned the loss of community it signaled. On the Fourth of July, Trim Tab Brewery in a revitalized section of Birmingham, Ala., closed after 13 years, ending its tenure as an exhibition and performance space. Many cities have had similar closures.
Health vs. Fellowship?
The realignment is testament to the power of messaging coming from various corners of the medical establishment, messaging that has convinced many Americans that even a few glasses of Sancerre a week can lead to serious illness and death. Three years ago, the World Health Organization declared that no amount of alcohol is safe. Across the country, sales of wine, beer and liquor, by volume, have been steadily decreasing: in 2023 falling 3 percent over the previous year; in 2025, 5 percent. I.W.S.R., the British research firm that ran these numbers, anticipates an 18 percent drop over the next decade. Data from the beer industry show the craft brewing work force in decline.
Employment metrics are just part of a calculus that counts consequences to ecosystems that are dependent on the habits that have fueled human fellowship for most of recorded time. From the birth of the public house in the 16th century to the revolution for gay rights, which began at the Stonewall Inn, alcohol has shaped the social politics of urban life. In tandem with new restaurants over the past 15 to 20 years, taprooms have drawn people to once sparsely populated downtowns. This was true of Angel City Brewery in the Los Angeles Arts District, which closed in April. Regulars mourned the loss of community it signaled. On the Fourth of July, Trim Tab Brewery in a revitalized section of Birmingham, Ala., closed after 13 years, ending its tenure as an exhibition and performance space. Many cities have had similar closures.
The realignment is testament to the power of messaging coming from various corners of the medical establishment, messaging that has convinced many Americans that even a few glasses of Sancerre a week can lead to serious illness and death. Three years ago, the World Health Organization declared that no amount of alcohol is safe.
Some collateral effects:
For decades, the Brown-Forman company has sustained the city’s museums and performing arts through corporate giving and its affiliated foundation. As directors of local cultural organizations will tell you, there is virtually no institution or preservation effort in Louisville that does not bear its imprint. For example, Patrick Lewis, the president of the city’s Filson Historical Society, noted that when Breonna Taylor was fatally shot by a Louisville police officer six years ago, Brown-Forman provided the money for the society to hire a full-time specialist in Black history.
During the last fiscal year, according to the company and tax filings, Brown-Forman gave away more than $14 million, making it among the leaders in local philanthropy. For example, by contrast, Churchill Downs, the host of the Kentucky Derby, distributed less than a quarter of that.
But Brown-Forman is more than a company and a philanthropic wing; it is a web of extended family members, individual executives and friends of the company who hold stock that has lost more than half of its value in the past five years. What most worries the town’s fund-raising class is the fading away of annual donations in the four or five digit range. As one cultural leader explained, the success of bourbon tourism could not compensate for the pronounced downturn in alcohol consumption, which has affected a network critical to supporting the city’s cultural life.
What of pleasure?
It is not the purview of public health officials to think about the ways in which alcohol consumption might affect arts funding. But doctors, therapists and epidemiologists talk a lot about the health costs of loneliness and social isolation in an increasingly virtual age.
Last year, an academic paper published in the journal Addiction by a professor of psychology in Denmark and a public health lecturer in Scotland stood out for its contrarianism, arguing that alcohol research had a “problem with pleasure.” It had been negated, they wrote, naïvely considered an illusion manufactured by advertisers and notable merely for its oppositional relationship to health.
Maybe, they ventured, it was time for a reframing.
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