How Drinking Culture is Being Rewired

The Friday roundup of things in the news

Good news, alcohol industry! Gen Z aren’t the teetotallers we keep hearing about. According to a new study by Time Out Australia, Gen Z is the “not-so-sober generation”.

But there’s a horrifying fact buried in the report that makes me think we should bypass Gen Z altogether and just wait for Gen Alpha to arrive.

Much of the report — called Sip Happens and available for free — dovetails with a lot of what’s written about Gen Z.

Some of what the authors write is interesting, and some should be taken with a grain of salt; they claim that Gen Z “isn’t lining up boozy benders”, for example. The Australian Bureau of Statistics begs to differ; their data shows that 36% of this age group are binge drinking at least occasionally.

The sample size is also small (150 Gen Z/150 Millennials) and it looks like the report is something of an advertising sales tool for Time Out.

But it’s mostly interesting — until you get to page 10. This is the page that says that Zoomers love organising home events, from dinner parties to book clubs.

And PowerPoint Parties.

The report claims that Gen Z loves switching on the PowerPoint so they can “roast each other with a playful presentation”.

I didn’t believe this, so I googled it.

It turns out that PowerPoint parties are a thing. There’s a CNN feature about them. There are people on Reddit begging for ideas. I even found a magazine article explaining (in the style of a kindergarten teacher) how to throw one:

“To plan and host a PowerPoint party, first, gather a select group of people you think will enjoy the party.”

It offers tips on how to turn your party into a drinking game:

Drunk history: Presenters choose a historical figure or event and present about it. Have everyone dress like their figure or era, and encourage people to have a drink or two before their presentation to make it really interesting.

Forget binge drinking. It turns out the real risk to public health is having to sit through a drunken slideshow on Henry VIII.

The Surprisingly Short Life of Dry January

Whenever I do a presentation about alcohol and health, I start by charting the social changes that began well before the anti-alcohol lobby broke into the media.

The big one was Dry January, launched by Alcohol Change in 2013. More than a decade later, it’s a cultural institution, with French politicians having public fights over whether to observe it or not.

But what’s the long-term impact of Dry January? I stumbled across a study on this question, published last November.

The answer is that no- and low- sales take off during January and sales of alcohol fall.

But the effect is temporary. No- and low- sales peak in January, and then drop, while alcohol sales rebound.

It’s quite an involved study that looks at sales, all the way back to 2014. Really, they could have saved themselves the effort and just asked a taxi driver.

I was in London in January and found it unusually easy to get a taxi on a Thursday evening. The driver said it was because everybody was doing Dry January and nobody was going out. But, he added, by week three everything would be back to normal, as people fell off the wagon.

Alcohol Change UK must be aware of this, which is why they launched Sober Spring in 2018, which lasts for a whopping 93 days. The idea was pitched to them by author Catherine Gray, who says that around day 60, not drinking feels normal and it’s easier to become permanently abstinent.

It hasn’t taken off the way Dry January, which has around nine million participants, has. In 2022, Sober Spring had about 4,000 participants.

The takeaway here is that abstinence campaigns have all the staying power of a New Year’s resolution.

This Lemon Spritz Is the It Drink of Summer

You know something’s gone viral when it turns up on a shelf in Lidl. The same day I spotted the cheap and cheerful limoncello spritz here in Germany, a press release arrived about a new Californian limoncello whose sales point is that it’s a great mixer.

A limoncello spritz juggernaut is emerging.

All credit for this should go to Rod Micallef of Zonzo Estate in Victoria. In a quest for cash flow during the pandemic, he launched a Bellini, combining peach nectar and Zonzo’s Prosecco. The first Australian bottled Bellini, it did so well that 12 imitators quickly followed.

Next, Micallef decided to create a limoncello. One night while peeling lemons, he hit on the idea of combining it with his Prosecco.

“We were the first in the world to bottle a limoncello spritz,” he told drinksdigest.com. “I’ve googled the crap out of it, and I can’t find anyone who did it before us.”

Zoncello was launched in March 2023 — and did a million bottles in just one year, despite being Zonzo Estate’s “least-ever marketed product”. It’s also bringing new and younger drinkers into the category by the cartload.

The limoncello spritz was soon copied, with Australia’s biggest companies launching their own versions at top speed. The drink’s now gone global, with advice on how to make a homemade version all over the web. All it needs is a big corporate to bring out a version, and it will be the new Aperol Spritz.

And, by the way, that’s Australian Prosecco that Micallef is using, grown in Victoria. The story about why Australia has Prosecco and nobody else outside Italy is allowed to use the name is so wild that Lulie Halstead and I did a whole A Question of Drinks podcast episode about it.

You’re Going to Sound Like a Chatbot

Hands up who’s seen the Black Mirror episode about the woman who gets the brain implant and then starts speaking in ads?

Because of a tumour, Amanda has part of her brain replaced with technology. But when she and her husband can’t keep paying the ever-increasing subscription tiers, she gets stuck at entry-level, complete with promos. Soon, she’s spouting ads.

Well, guess what? It’s beginning to happen in the real world. This week the Washington Post reported that ChatGPT’s most overused words are appearing in normal conversation.

In other words, ChatGPT is changing the way users speak.

The LLMs were mostly trained on what’s freely available on the internet. Although they’ve had some training on books and stolen NY Times articles, a significant portion of their training comes from the junk marketing and SEO copy that dominates the web.

The implications are horrifying. The day when people speak like marketing brochures might really be coming.

Just yesterday, I saw someone on social media recommending that people study Roman history, because it’s good ‘training data’. I’m sure it’s also great for PowerPoint parties.

Shameless self promotion

A few weeks ago, I featured Michael Moriarty and Nash Hale, co-founders of Orka Beverage Company, on the podcast. I thought it was a great (and funny) story, and wrote it up for Forbes. You can read it here or listen to it here.

In late June, I spoke at the Harvard Data Science Initiative’s Vine to Mind symposium. They’ve just published a discussion of the event, and referenced my remarks.

I also recommend reading Areni Global CEO Pauline Vicard’s summary of her own very thought-provoking presentation.