Millennials are responsible for more killings than Jeffrey Dahmer. At this point, my generation—those us born, roughly, between the 1982 and the year 2000—have been accused of killing dinner dates, golf, napkins, running, and Applebees. (OK, that last one is justifiable homicide.)
And now it’s beer, that we’re being blamed for the reported death of. A Washington Post article (the Post is America’s foremost millennial-whispering publication) writes,
Curiously, the article then goes on to contradict itself: “Research firm Nielsen showed a slight decline in beer penetration across the United States compared to 2016, although wine and spirits penetration stayed about the same. But Goldman’s research revealed a shift away from beer to wine and spirits amongst those 35-44.” That last sentence was odd, given that people aged between 35 and 44 years old aren’t even millennials.
Nonplussed, I went ahead and got my hands on the actual cited Goldman Sachs report. And it turns out that the data are cloudier than a home-brewed IPA.
To start, Goldman Sachs (citing Nielsen data) does find that beer penetration—the percentage of the population that consumes the stuff—has fallen off a cliff among Americans aged 35 to 44 over the last couple of quarters:
Among millennials, however, the story looks rather more mixed, especially in context of the last few years:
For one, the recent decline in suds-penetration has leveled off among millennials and was becoming worse among the cohort aged 35 to 44; so if beer is in fact in decline, it’s bizarre to say the “culprit” is the millennials. Moreover, taken as a whole, beer consumption looks pretty much stagnant among America’s youngest cohort of legal drinkers. It goes up some quarters, goes down some quarters, and holds steady other times. Indeed, it was only—not surprisingly!—during last year’s presidential election that consumption of all forms of alcohol skyrocketed. And lastly, it looks like beer penetration pretty much tracks drinking of all kinds, giving the lie to the narrative that millennials are turning away from beer in favor of wine and spirits.
It’s odd that the media continue to point to millennials in all manner of declinist narratives, no matter how thin the actual facts on the ground. But maybe that’s because legacy journalism is just another industry that my cohort has been accused of snuffing out.
