Dry January is losing its fizz, especially among younger drinkers.
In the UK, the share of Gen Z legal-age drinkers who tried a 31-day alcohol hiatus plunged from 33% in late 2024 to just 24% by late 2025.
Temporary teetotalism isn’t the badge of honour it was a few years back. The performative social media posts are fewer and further between, and Gen Z never really liked sanctimony anyway. Moderation isn’t dead by any means, but young drinkers seem less interested in virtue-signalling their abstinence for a month.
According to the latest IWSR Bevtrac survey, 74% of Gen Z adults reported drinking alcohol in the latter half of 2025 — a sharp rise from 66% in early 2023, and one that puts Gen Z only a whisker behind older generations’ (about 77% for all adults).
So why is Gen Z picking up the pint glasses and wine bottles with new enthusiasm?
Several forces are at play.
Rising incomes and confidence: The oldest members of Gen Z are now in their mid-to- late 20s, moving up in their careers and earning thicker pay cheques. With every passing year, more of them have disposable income. And guess what? They’re spending some of it on alcohol. Drinking has always tracked closely with economic comfort. Gen Z came of age during a cost-of-living crisis, which put a damper on nights out. Now, as their financial outlook brightens (however slightly), they’re loosening up.
Social normalisation: After a few strange years of pandemic isolation and wellness evangelism, drinking is simply cool again, or at least normal. Grabbing a drink is back to being a standard social ritual for Gen Z, not a transgression.
Broader Repertoires: Today’s youth aren’t returning to the same old pints and gin-tonics, they’re exploring a wider world of alcohol. From craft beers and hard kombuchas to quirky cocktails and soju shots. Surveys, such as this one from the IWSR, show that Gen Z drinkers sample more categories of alcoholic beverages than any other generation (over five different drink types in the past six months on average, vs about four for baby boomers). Of course, some of this breadth may be a function of age more than generation (younger drinkers have always been more experimental), however it speaks to a mindset that is open, curious and far from teetotal.
Just as Gen Z are ramping up their bar outings, millennials (now in their late 20s to early 40s) are tapping the brakes. Millennials remain the heaviest-drinking generation overall, but they’ve begun to moderate and even cut back in notable ways.
IWSR data also shows that Millennial drinkers hit an all-time low participation rate in late 2025. Only 81% had consumed alcohol in the past six months, down from 83% earlier in the year. Sure, 81% is still a lot, but it signals a slow decline for a cohort that, not so long ago, was 90%+ partial to a pint.
More telling is how Millennials are drinking: they’ve shrunk their repertoires and dialed down the party. A typical Millennial drinking occasion now involves fewer types of alcohol than before, they used to mix nearly three different categories in a night, but recently it’s closer to just one or two.
This generation that gave us the craft beer boom and endless cocktail Instagram posts is finally embracing moderation… Or maybe just entering middle age.
From a cultural and marketing standpoint, this is a pivotal moment. The narrative of Gen Z as the abstemious, virtue-driven outlier was always oversimplified, and now we have the proof. Yes, moderation matters to them. They still drink slightly less often than older folks and are mindful about it, but they’re clearly not allergic to alcohol. They merely indulge a little differently.
Julius Judah is creative strategy director at Eight&four
Main image: Rakúsky maliar z 1. polovice 19. storočia – Bacchanalia, 1800–1850, Slovenská národná galéria, SNG