Americans’ consumption of alcohol has remained steady for nearly 15 years, but a new report from the research division of food and agribusiness financial firm Rabobank shows that Americans who imbibe are skewing more female, more diverse and older.
“Groups that have historically drank more are drinking more moderately, and groups that historically drank less are drinking more,” Rabobank beverages analyst Bourcard Nesin told Brewbound. “Demographics became a less reliable determinant of your alcohol consumption behavior.”
2019 marked the first year in American history that more women than men were consumers of alcohol — 50.1% of drinkers younger than 25 were women. In part, this can be attributed to women delaying marriage as they obtain degrees and pursue careers.
Typically, women drink less after marriage, Nesin explained. He studied data from the year 2004 for the report that showed that 65% of unmarried women drank once a month or more, while only 40% of married women did.
“This rise in consumption is largely a story of empowerment, not despair,” Nesin wrote in the report. “For example, women represent 57% of recent college graduates, and many are delaying (or foregoing entirely) marriage and starting a family until later in life – all reliable predictors of regular alcohol use.”
Today, only 10% of American women marry before age 25, down from 20% in 2004, Nesin said.
And it’s not just putting off marriage or motherhood that’s creating a rise in consumption. Shifting attitudes have normalized alcohol consumption for mothers, resulting in pages and pages of “wine mom” merchandise on craft marketplace Etsy and even a line of still hard water called Mom Water.
“There’s more acceptability around like ‘I can be a good mom and have a glass of wine or have a beer,’” he said. “There’s a lot more empathy, I think, toward women.”
Beverage alcohol producers have taken note of women’s increased rates of consumption, Nesin said.
“Everyone was targeting women and you’re seeing that reflected in the ads that are out there,” he said.
Beer’s portrayal of women in advertising has seismically shifted in recent years. Women have gone from being depicted as barmaids serving beer to male clientele and bikini-clad companions to beer-drinking men to enjoying beers themselves. In 2019, Coors Light — the brand that formerly included odes to glamorized twin sisters in its marketing materials — debuted a commercial in its Made to Chill campaign dubbed “The Official Beer of Being Done Wearing a Bra.” In it, a millennial woman has just arrived home from a day at work in business casual attire. She drops her work bag, slips out of her heels and pulls a Coors Light from her fridge. After cracking the can open, she wriggles her bra out from under her blouse. It’s completely non-sexual and clearly a ritual she engages in at day’s end.
Most remarkable about the commercial is that it depicts a woman having a moment to herself and enjoying a beer — not wine, chocolate, ice cream or any other of the foods and beverages marketed to women as special treats they should intermittently allow themselves.
Armed with the information that their potential drinker base is changing, Nesin said he hopes beverage alcohol companies can evolve to recruit new consumers.
“I hope it helps brands understand that these past practices that they used to really pay dividends are now baggage that they need to repair and get better at really appealing to everybody,” he said.
According to Nesin’s report, women of all races have been imbibing more. Since 2004, the number of women of color regularly consuming alcohol has increased 84%.
In the past decade and a half, the rate of alcohol consumption among all people of color increased 8%, to 31%, in 2019. However, the younger cohort of this group drinks at a higher rate than the total population — 40% of regular alcohol consumers younger than 25 are not white.
Gen Z, Americans born after 1996, are reaching legal drinking age and are more diverse than any other generation before them — a scant majority of them, 52%, are white and non-Hispanic, according to the Pew Research Center.
According to market research firm Nielsen, craft beer over-indexes with white people in both number of buyers (108 sharepoints on a scale of 100) and dollars spent (112). African Americans were the most underrepresented group in both drinkers (51) and spending (39).
Nesin hopes that evidence of a diverse drinker base will encourage beverage alcohol brands to develop inclusive messaging.
“What this report should do is force companies to double check the stereotype they hold in their mind of their consumer,” he said. “That’s especially true for some really premium brands.”
Consumer insights are commonly used to create archetypal drinkers or shoppers around whom to build campaigns and brand messaging. However, ugly stereotypes can seep into marketing strategies and create exclusionary messaging and uglier attitudes.
Nesin recounted an anecdote unearthed in his research from a technology firm that provided a data set to a spirits company that showed its drinker base was becoming more diverse. The spirits brand team wasn’t interested in learning more because they were concerned about diluting the brand’s luxury status, he said.
“Demographics aren’t destiny, but they are kind of a necessary way for us to think about who we market to,” Nesin said. “We don’t market to robots, so you have to picture somebody in your head, and the person you picture in your head is ultimately the person you’re trying to serve in your creative and your marketing.”
Bringing demographic information into marketing conversations may seem daunting, especially after the racial reckoning that 2020 brought. The alcohol executives he interviewed told Nesin they didn’t use it to direct their marketing.
“Every beverage alcohol company I spoke to said ‘We don’t market to race, we don’t market to gender,’” he said, adding that such “colorblind” policies are usually much more exclusionary in practice. “Maybe not in your targeting, but when you have somebody creating an ad, they have a person in mind. And when we talk about middle class America, we are almost always picturing a suburban white family in our mind.”
By creating environments both online and offline that are more welcoming to those beyond beer’s traditional drinker base of white men, breweries and other producers may find that they can bring everyone along for the ride, Nesin said.
“The hope is to dispel some of those prejudices and communicate a few stories that help leaders and marketers in the industry understand that serving these underserved groups is probably going to help meet the needs of a lot of other people too,” he said.
A few executives interviewed by Nesin explained that as white people, they felt uncomfortable explicitly saying their brands marketed to people of color. The solution to that problem is clear, Nesin said: Brands need to hire diverse teams, which can result in more perspectives represented and more inclusive messaging.
To help craft breweries and other beverage producers achieve this, non-profit organization Beer Kulture has created a job board companies can use to recruit from a diverse candidate pool. Opportunities listed include bartending, brewing and production roles, as well as sales and marketing positions.
Beer Kulture co-founder, CEO and president Latiesha Cook told Brewbound 12 candidates have found jobs through the jobs board at New York City-headquartered Torch and Crown Brewing, St. Petersburg, Florida-based Green Bench Brewing and Comstock, Michigan-based Bell’s Brewery, one of the nation’s largest craft brewers by volume.
After the death of George Floyd in May 2020 at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer and the Black Lives Matter demonstrations that followed, craft breweries nationwide shared messages of solidarity on social media and thousands participated in the Black is Beautiful collaboration spearheaded by San Antonio, Texas-based Weathered Souls Brewing.
Using the Beer Kulture board to hire candidates of color shows that breweries are walking the walk, instead of just talking the talk, Cook said.
“Breweries are saying that they support our mission and their participation is an action piece to show it,” she said. “Others say that they believe in diversity, equity and inclusion but have had a hard time getting their positions posted in front of a diverse pool of candidates — our job board has given them a place to do that.”
Cook added that the Beer Kulture job board provides connections to job seekers who companies may not otherwise be in the pipeline.
“When breweries broaden their job candidate pool through Beer Kulture, they can expect to reach an untapped demographic,” Cook said. “ When a brewery posts on our job board, they are getting access to a talented, skilled and diverse group of individuals.”
In addition to connecting breweries with job candidates of color, Beer Kulture’s mission includes introducing craft beer to people who have traditionally been left out of the conversation. The organization collaborates with breweries from coast to coast on beer releases and community fundraising projects.
For Cook, beer has strong nostalgic powers. It reminds her of her grandfather, known in the family as abuelo, who drank one with every meal, and her grandmother, Mamita, who she says loved beer even more.
“Beer has already been a communal beverage in the Black space, in the Hispanic space, and in almost all non-white spaces,” Cook said. “We’ve always been present, just not represented.”