Beer Remains the Favorite American Beverage

Sixty-seven percent of U.S. adults drink alcohol, a slight increase over last year and the highest reading recorded since 1985, and beer remains the favorite beverage of Americans, according to a recent Gallup survey.

Despite some yearly fluctuations, the percentage of Americans who say they drink alcohol has been remarkably stable over Gallup’s 71 years of tracking it. The high point for drinking came in 1976-1978, when 71 percent said they drank alcohol. (Many of us Baby Boomers first started drinking in the early 1970s, especially those of us from the bicentennial class of 1976 : )

The low of 55 percent was recorded when Gallup first asked Americans about drinking, in the waning days of the Great Depression in 1939, when 58 percent of adults admitted they were drinkers – long after national prohibition was repealed. (There are still counties in Alabama that still have legal prohibitions on the sale and consumption of alcohol : (

A majority of Americans in most demographic subgroups of the population drink, though in some groups drinking is more prevalent than in others.

One of the most significant predictors of alcohol consumption is church attendance. Those who seldom or never attend church are substantially more likely than more frequent church attenders to say they drink; and those who have no religious identity, Catholics, and non-Christians are more likely to drink than Protestants.

Medical research shows that moderate drinking is associated with a lower probability of heart trouble, and Gallup has recently confirmed that the incidence of heart attacks increases substantially with age.

Still, the data indicate that many older Americans are not taking advantage of the prophylactic benefit of drinking; 59 percent of older Americans drink alcohol, substantially lower than the percentages among those who are younger. Additionally, those with the lowest education levels and lowest incomes are less likely to drink than others.

Beer’s popularity has slipped only slightly over the years. In 1992 and 1994, 47 percent of drinkers named it as their preferred drink, compared with 41 percent this year.

Beverage preferences vary widely across demographic groups, with beer most preferred among men, younger drinkers, and those in the Midwest. Wine ranks as the preferred beverage among women and older Americans.

Men under 50 are among those who most strongly prefer beer, which does not come as a surprise to those who observe the preponderance of beer ads embedded in sports and other programming aimed at young men. Older women are the biggest fans of wine, while roughly equal numbers of women under 50 choose wine and beer.

The older skew in preference for wine is starkly apparent when one looks at drinkers aged 18 to 34, who are highly likely to choose beer as their preferred beverage, and among whom wine is slightly behind even liquor. By contrast, drinkers 55 and older clearly choose wine as their preferred beverage.

Although beer is the top choice in all four major regions of the country, residents on the two coasts are somewhat more likely to prefer wine than are those living elsewhere. Beer remains most popular in the Midwest.

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Tags: Beer Remains the Favorite American Beverage, The Vast Majority of Americans Consume Alcohol

This entry was posted on Friday, July 30th, 2010 at 4:39 pm and is filed under Public Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.