No booze no bar to good times

Hard as it may be to swallow, a study of the drinks market shows that last year, alcohol consumption in major markets such the US, Japan, Germany and Brazil fell 5%, while low and no-alcohol drinks rose 1% during the period. Which means more people were not drowning their pandemic woes in sanitising spirits of the non-handwashing variety. That has also corresponded with a rise in the production of no alcohol wines, beers, whisky, gin and tequila, as oxymoronic as that may sound to intrepid alcohol lovers in India and elsewhere. But drinks companies have their work cut out for them to retain the flavour (in body, if not in spirit) and also assure their products’ shelf life without the preservative input of alcohol. Ensuring consumers get their kick without alcohol has certainly raised the bar for the industry.

Of course, the alcoholic drinks market is still in high spirits as it far outsells non-alcoholic beverages. For instance, in the four countries mentioned above, 9.7 billion cases of alcohol were sold in 2020 but only 292 million cases of low- and noalcohol beverages. But global consumption of the latter is growing three times faster than alcohol, with anecdotal evidence suggesting so far that the main consumers are in the 30-40-year age bracket, with a fair number of women. Will booze soon evaporate? That is a sobering thought, indeed