I am not the kind of guy who would ever be in a place like this, I thought, halfway through my first Zoom happy hour, in the tedious early days of quarantine. But there I was, toasting a laptop screen, participating—like you probably have—in a brand-new era of drinking culture.
Pandemic drove us inside. Once there, we did what we do best: We innovated. The Zoom drinks came first. Liquor-store sales shot up 25 percent the first week of April as at-home drinking spiked, and the booze-delivery service Drizly reported a 439 percent increase in orders. By May, restaurants were putting their cocktails in to-go cups, enabling us to order Negronis with our take-out pizza. We bought wine by the case, split shipments with our neighbors. And we settled into a new style of drinking too—starting a little earlier in the day, maybe; sipping wine and discovering lighter, less boozy cocktails. Before long, new stalwarts showed up in our home bars, spirits better suited for a summer spent closer to home. We got to know aperitifs. More than that, we got to know aperitif culture.
Though it might have felt sudden—everything about 2020 has felt sudden—the evolution of our drinking habits has been taking shape for a little while now. Wellness, that cultural watchword that's transformed nearly everything we eat or drink, has been prodding the liquor industry to think a bit differently—the result being a heap of new products designed to meet changing tastes and habits.
For instance, in Sonoma County, Woody Hambrecht, a third-generation winemaker, and his wife, Helena Price Hambrecht, glimpsed a chance to create something new after growing tired of their old routines. “We were around alcohol five to seven nights a week for the last decade-plus, and it was really starting to wear on us,” Helena says, articulating a sentiment that I've increasingly encountered among my own friends and colleagues (and felt myself). They were noticing, in the past couple of years, that people were drinking differently, socializing differently—for many, the ritualistic demands of being in a bar weren't doing it for them. They had a distaste for getting drunk, especially in work environments, and isn't everything becoming a kind of work environment now? And don't get them started on hangovers. “Why does drinking have to be this way?” Helena says they got to wondering. “Does it really have to make us feel this horrible?”
As it turns out: No. When the Hambrechts set out to create a low-alcohol spirit that they call Haus, they looked to Europe, with its light predinner aperitifs, for inspiration. For decades, tanned and underemployed Continental loafs have been gloriously perfecting a dignified form of day drinking there. This is drinking without the intention of getting drunk—the sort of drinking you do on a terrace just after lunch if you have to drive a Vespa later. So-called session drinking relies upon spirits well suited for dilution—bright and herbal and half as boozy as the whiskeys of the U.S. and the U.K. This kind of thing could be adapted for American drinkers, the Hambrechts decided. “We're not reinventing the wheel necessarily,” Helena says of the aperitif they created. “We're just taking this type of drink that's been successful in Europe for a hundred-plus years and bringing it to a culture that seems to want it.”
Like, say, Aperol, Haus can be used as a base spirit to create cocktails with other ingredients. But unlike Aperol, Haus is mellow enough in flavor to sip by itself as a ready-to-drink beverage. The Hambrechts hit on another innovation by figuring out how to sell Haus online, bypassing the tiered distribution racket that has defined U.S. alcohol sales since the end of Prohibition. Utilizing a stipulation for wine-based spirits below a certain alcohol by volume (ABV) threshold, Haus became one of the first “direct-to-consumer” spirits on the market.
While Haus has been teaching Americans how to drink like Europeans, the big domestic distilleries and breweries have been looking to capitalize on the same shifting predilections. This is how we ended up with at least a dozen new low-ABV, low-calorie, low-sugar products, all loosely contained within the buzzy, seemingly irresistible category of hard seltzer. California's largest wine exporter created a drink called High Noon, and you've perhaps seen Bud Light Seltzer or Natty Light Seltzer or Molson Coors's Vizzy or, from the makers of Sam Adams, Truly. And then there was the sensation that the makers of Mike's Hard Lemonade caused last summer with White Claw. For about a month, White Claw was so popular that its producer—not exactly a small, upstart operation—simply couldn't fulfill demand. Sales of hard seltzers as a category rose more than 200 percent last year, swiping almost 5 percent off beer's market share in one fell swoop.
On the periphery of the hard seltzers and the low-ABV spirits, a whole bar cart of other ascendant new products are jockeying to change how you think about drinking. A company called Kin Euphorics markets an amaro-adjacent concoction with a novel twist: It has replaced the booze with a mixture of adaptogens and nootropics. If you tripped over those words, you're not alone, but nootropics—essentially supplements said to increase cognitive function—have become fiercely popular in certain tech-world circles and among the sort of ambitious, self-optimizing tinkerers for whom a hangover would be anathema. To them, nootropics work as a type of miracle drug; you might think of them as Ritalin for people with an aversion to pharmaceuticals.
Jen Batchelor, cofounder of Kin Euphorics, realized that nootropics could be useful not only at the office but also in social situations. “Why would we relegate them to simply being able to code for eight hours at a time?” she recalls thinking. “I certainly want to be more coherent, more articulate, when I'm hanging out with friends.” Batchelor was looking for something that would allow a person to participate in drinking culture without having to drink—and, crucially, without having to palm a tonic and lime all night. She wanted to make something that was more than just a prop.
A similar aspiration guided Ben Branson to launch his nonalcoholic brand, Seedlip, in the U.K. in 2015. It has since spread to cocktail lounges and bar carts in the U.S. Seedlip is an actual distilled spirit, not a substitute for one, meaning it's got all the heft of gin but none of the alcohol—an idea that prompted an early investment, and then outright acquisition, by liquor giant Diageo last year.
“I think we're a bit more conscious of what we put in our bodies. We read the labels, we like to know where things come from, we like to know who's behind them,” says Branson. “And I think, secondly, we are more focused than ever before on our health and wellness. We have access to products, tools, software, podcasts, et cetera, that can help us be more informed as to the choices we make in our lives. We know that we should exercise. We know that we should eat better.”
While Kin and Seedlip both serve the actual sober folks among us, their appeal is far wider. “About 20 percent of our consumers are in the sober-curious category,” Batchelor says, referring to people who still drink but see the value in a dry night—or week, or month. “There's so many reasons that people come to [Kin]. More than anything, we hear that it's additive, as opposed to having to get rid of something entirely—it's more of a moderation.”
This tinkering with old habits, this retooling for the future by trying something new, has become a theme across the culture this year. We've been taking stock of our routines, have we not? When we locked things down during quarantine, we cracked spines on cookbooks, listened to audiobooks about the Spanish flu, devised exercise routines in a corner of the living room. And we taught ourselves how to drink on Zoom. The new spirits we'd been flirting with turned out to be the perfect companions. No surprise then that Seedlip and Kin both saw a significant uptick in orders in April. And from March to April, Haus recorded growth of 500 percent on its core line of spirits, according to Hambrecht.
Across the industry, the data reflects the moment of transition. Liquor-store sales may be up, but with bars having been closed, the producers have spent the year selling significantly less booze overall. Which is to say: People are drinking at home more than ever before, and many of them are drinking more frequently, but in general we're consuming less alcohol. We've discovered, finally, and partially by accident, a sort of new moderation—one that's marked by an explosion of new things to try and new ways to experiment. “The more and more these other options are available, I think, the more people realize, yeah, it actually is possible to find some sort of consumption schedule that works for you,” Haus's Helena Price Hambrecht says. “People are realizing there's a mix now.” Indeed. Just add seltzer.
Mark Byrne is a writer in New York who has also been a consultant and an entrepreneur in the liquor industry.
A version of this story originally appears in the August 2020 issue with the title "The Future of Drinking Has a Very Light Buzz".
