Living Proof
Gen Z Appears to Be Reversing No-Drinking Trend, Now Lurching Toward Alcoholism
The kids have fallen off the wagon.
Published Jul 20, 2026 1:09 PM EDT
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The world has been obsessed with what Gen Z is or isn’t doing.
They’re not having sex, apparently. They don’t go out. And let’s not forget drinking: for the young twenty-somethings to forgo damaging their livers and brains by imbibing poison as prolifically as their predecessors clearly shows a lack of respect — and that they don’t know anything about having a good time.
But it appears that in the end, the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree. New research from beverage retail research group IWSR shows that Gen Z are now catching up on boozing like a friend knocking back a whole row of shots after showing up later than they said they would.
“They’re late to the party, they’re not skipping the party,” IWSR president Marten Lodewijks told Business Insider.
According to the survey, 74 percent of Gen-Zers say they’ve had at least one drink over the past six months, a huge leap from 66 percent just three three years ago. The heaviest drinkers were Millennials at 81 percent, and the lightest were Baby Boomers at 71 percent. Gen X, fittingly, were in the middle at 77 percent.
The legal drinking age youths are catching up, but their drinking habits look a little different from their elders’. They’re drinking more cocktails than any other generation, with 84 saying that they had a mixed drink in the past six months. Gen-Zers were also the most likely to follow government health guidance on alcohol (49 percent), and the most likely to say they drank alcohol with five or more people on their last occasion (18 percent).
In a statement, Lodewijks declared that Gen-Z’s reputation as the generation of moderation “is now conclusively debunked.”
“The evidence demonstrates that Gen Z consumers enjoy drinking at roughly the same levels as the rest of society,” he added.
In retrospect, it always should’ve been clear why Gen-Zers didn’t drink as much. Shifting attitudes towards drinking culture may be part of it, sure, but what almost certainly had the biggest part to say was the COVID-19 pandemic that stopped them from going out around when many of them just hit their legal drinking age.
“They were literally coming of age at a point in which everything got shut down,” Lodewijks told BI.
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