Happy hours. Bar crawls. Tailgates. Drinking is deeply rooted in American culture and pervasive within our social rituals.
In fact, you’d be hard-pressed to go anywhere in the U.S. without finding a place to get a drink. Despite a recent decline among younger adults, Americans consume about 2.8 gallons of alcohol per person per year.
Of course, alcohol is not generally purchased or consumed by the gallon. So, how much do Americans drink, really?
To keep things legal, we served up the answer based on a standard drink containing 0.6 fluid ounces of ethanol divided among the number of residents over the age of 21.
By this metric, the average U.S. adult consumes approximately 1.5 alcoholic beverages a day.
That’s 45 drinks each month.
And 598 drinks a year.
What’s in the glass?
Spirits are the most popular choice among Americans, with the average adult consuming 253 liquor-based drinks annually.
Beer is the second most popular choice, with 244 drinks per person per year.
Wine is the least consumed beverage, with its popularity steadily declining. The average adult consumes 101 glasses of wine in a year.
Altogether, adults in the U.S. consume the equivalent of about 148 billion standard drinks every year.
To get a better sense of scale, let’s imagine that each one of these drinks was consumed out of a standard 6-ounce beer can.
If you placed each can next to the other in a line, it would stretch far enough to circle the entire Earth… 340 times!
If you stacked each can on top of one another, it would rise high enough to reach the Moon — 45 times!
In standard drinks
Just as alcohol consumption differs from person to person in reality, there are significant differences in consumption and drink preference by state as well.
New Hampshire and Delaware are the heaviest drinkers based on per capita alcohol consumption. In New Hampshire, people consumed an average of 1,057 standard drinks per person per year, or about 2.9 drinks per day — nearly 1.8 times the national average!
Meanwhile in Delaware, adults consumed 968 drinks.
Nationally, spirits were the most consumed type of alcoholic drink, but they are exceedingly popular in some states.
New Hampshire, Delaware, and Washington, D.C. recorded the highest per-capita spirits consumption, each exceeding 400 standard drinks per year.
Beer is the drink of choice in Montana, where per-capita consumption exceeds 300 standard drinks a year, making it one of three states where beer is the most consumed beverage.
Vermont, North Dakota, and Pennsylvania show a similar pattern, each averaging more than 300 beers per person annually and ranking among the top five states.
Wine consumption is also high in Washington, D.C., New Hampshire, and Vermont. While California and Hawaii rank only in the middle for spirits and beer, they stand out as top wine-drinking states.
The United States is far from the only place where alcohol is embedded in culture. In fact, among OECD countries, the U.S. falls near the middle in overall per-capita alcohol consumption. However, it ranks much higher in the consumption of spirits, placing seventh overall, while its beer and wine consumption are relatively lower.
In contrast, European countries like Italy, Portugal, and France have low spirits consumption but rank among the highest in wine consumption.
While looking at alcohol consumption on a per capita basis gives an estimate for the national average, it obscures individual differences and the darker side of drinking.
Excessive drinking, or binge drinking, is widespread. About 17% of adults binge drink, meaning they consume four or more drinks for women or five or more for men on a single occasion.
It contributes to higher rates of violence, impaired driving, car crashes, and emergency room visits, and places increased pressure on law enforcement and public health systems. Excessive alcohol use is linked to roughly 178,000 deaths each year, or 488 deaths every day, making it one of the nation’s leading causes of preventable death.
The economic toll it takes is staggering as well. In 2010, the most recent year for which data is available, the cost of excessive drinking in the U.S. was estimated to be $249 billion. Adjusted for inflation, that is $368.5 billion today.
However, attitudes towards alcohol use and binge drinking do appear to be shifting - especially among younger Americans. Gallup has reported three consecutive years of decline in drinking rates among respondents in their annual consumption habits survey. Even more encouraging is that even those who do drink, reported that they are now drinking less and more infrequently.
Perhaps this is the beginning of a healthier relationship with alcohol in the United States.
Estimates of alcohol consumption in the United States are based on data from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA).
The NIAAA reports per capita ethanol consumption among the population aged 21 and older. For 2022, this value is 2.8 gallons of pure ethanol per person per year. This value was converted into the number of standard drinks using the U.S. definition of a standard drink, which contains 0.6 fluid ounces of pure ethanol.
For cross-country comparisons, alcohol consumption was measured in liters of pure alcohol per capita (age 15+), a standard metric used by the World Health Organization, and converted into the equivalent number of standard drinks.