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The popularity of Dry January has swelled in recent years alongside the sober curious movement. Instead of resisting, the alcohol industry has embraced these trends.
For years, Dry January has been an opportunity for people to cut back on the amount of alcohol they drink. However, in recent years the popularity of this start of year tradition has ballooned in the U.S. alongside a broader sober curious movement led by young people that has redefined tastes.
The shift has not only impacted peoples’ lives but changed the very fabric of the alcohol industry itself, says Malcolm Purinton, an assistant teaching professor of history at Northeastern University who studies the history of beer, brewing, technology and trade.
January has always been a bad month for the alcohol industry, Purinton says, especially compared to the summer and the fever pitch season between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. Dry January has exacerbated that seasonal dip in sales.
“The sober part, the completely dry, does have a marked effect on sales,” Purinton says. “That decline is noticeably worse than it used to be in the United States and Western Europe.”
There is typically a little bit of a jump in sales in February but “not as much as you would expect,” he adds.
However, the alcohol industry has figured out a way to adapt to the sober season and beyond. The rise of the sober curious movement, which Purinton says has been spearheaded largely by the health conscious, social media-networked and pandemic-era coming of experiences of Gen Z, has led many companies to add non-alcoholic alternatives to their portfolio.
“Prohibition lasted for a solid 10 or so years, and a lot of the major companies … came out of it pretty well because they were able to diversify their portfolio, including making near beer that was near to beer but didn’t taste nearly as good as the options today,” Purinton says.
Some companies were starting to adapt prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. A generational shift in tastes was already appearing in Gen Z as the craft beer and IPAs that were popular with millennials declined in popularity.
Tastes among young people instead shifted toward less bitter, lower-alcohol beers and sweeter drinks, including seltzers and cocktails. During and after the pandemic, that moved further toward removing alcohol altogether, as young people who would have normally come of age in a social drinking environment instead did so in their parents’ house away from other young people, Purinton observes.
“Learning how to form those bonds differently without the alcohol has had an ongoing social effect as well as [an effect on] the industry too,” Purinton says.
Now, “you have to have some kind of non-alcoholic alternative,” Purinton says. One distributor that Purinton talked to didn’t have any non-alcoholic options going into January, and its sales tanked by 50% as a result. He notes that for the last couple of years sales of mocktails and non-alcoholic beer have spiked in January specifically.
“Now if you are anywhere –– a restaurant, a bar –– there will be non-alcoholic alternatives,” Purinton says. “If there aren’t, that’s a huge cutting out of a population that wants to be out, wants to be social, wants to be included in all of these activities that the bar, the pub, the taproom all represent, but with this new perspective toward health consciousness, cost and control.”
The industry, including major players like Heineken and Guinness, has invested heavily into technology that can create non-alcoholic beer that tastes as close as possible to its alcoholic counterpart. Athletic Brewing Company in particular has seen its profile as a brewer of solely non-alcoholic beer rise in recent years.
The lingering question for the industry is whether the sober curious movement and the current resonance of Dry January are trends that will fade or a more permanent shift in the landscape of alcohol in the U.S. Purinton says the movement is here to stay, although he anticipates it will start to dip in popularity in the next three to five years.
“I see that continuing to impact for several more years, but I think you’ll see not a shift towards greater alcohol consumption but a normalization of sober curiosity where you won’t see that term as much,” Purinton says. “It will become a norm.”