Generation Z are drinking less than the generations that preceded them, and terms like “sober-curious” and “mindful drinking” are gaining popularity amongst millennials. The low- and no-alcohol industry is growing at pace, and there's a lot up for grabs
Nirvana is located inside a small unit on an industrial estate near Leyton, east London. It’s squeezed between a scrap-metal yard, a Romanian food distributor, an outpost for a Pentecostal church and a Kingsmill bread factory. Nearby, lorries beep and extractor pipes send fragrant plumes of smoke into a pale sky. A pair of beige, new-build apartment blocks in the distance offer the only indications of the area’s ongoing gentrification.
This content is imported from Instagram. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.In the space of a few years, the alcohol-free drinks industry has gone from inconsequential to a source of major growth and innovation. UK sales of low- and no-alcohol beers have almost doubled in five years, rising from £195m in 2016 to £370m at the end of 2021, according to research group The IWSR .
Human beings have been drinking alcohol to celebrate, commiserate, misbehave, seduce and socialise for a very, very long time. There are suggestions that early humans were brewing mead 50,000 years ago. Vikings and Germanic barbarians loved a tear-up in a beer hall on a Saturday night, and the Chinese were mixing up spirits long before Christ was around.
It’ll take more than some east-London trendies to change the habits of millennia. But, in 2023, it can seem that getting leathered has lost its lustre. And the group one may expect to crave alcohol’s disinhibiting effects the most — the young and hormonally charged — is the one that seems to be least attracted to consuming alcohol, certainly in comparison with their predecessors.
And it’s not just young people. “There is some sense,” says Holmes, “that things are [also] shifting among other age groups and that we might be moving, as a society, towards a different relationship with alcohol and being drunk over time. There appears to be less glamour around drinking, and not drinking has also become more attractive. It’s very clear from the data that people are drinking far more low- or non- alcohol drinks than they used to. There’s far less stigma around them.
“It’s not the same, is it?” says Laura Willoughby, the co-founder of Club Soda, a newly opened tasting room and bottle shop in Covent Garden dedicated to low- and zero-alcohol drinks. We’re sitting opposite each other at a window table drinking a glass of sparkling chardonnay by Noughty, a British brand that makes a range of de-alcoholised wines. It’s quite nice. Not a 1995 Dom Perignon P2 Plenitude Brut. Not plonk.
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