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White Hutchinson Leisure & Learning Group, Kansas City, MO, USA

The great beer abandonment

Beer has fallen out of favor with young adults according to a new study published by Goldman Sachs Investment Research. The percentage of young adults age 18 to 29 who prefer beer to other alcohol has fallen to 40% from three-quarters twenty years ago.

Meanwhile, the very opposite is taking place with hard alcohol. The percentage of young adults who prefer spirits has increased to 30% today from 13% in the early 1990s. And the wine has also increased as a preference, from 15% in the early 1990s to 25% today.

Young adults aren't the only ones for whom beer has who have fallen out of favor. Nationwide, beer consumption fell by nearly 9% between 2002 and 2012.

The Washington Post speculated it's possible that young people are merely rebelling against the tastes of the generation before them - a sort of alcohol-soaked shift that's more reactionary than people realize. People, after all, tend to eschew what their parents drink, because what their parents drink isn't "cool."

"Alcohol consumption is cyclical by nature," Thomas Malandrakis, a market analyst with Morningstar said. "Believe it or not, we tend to drink what our grandparents drank, not what our parents drank."

If that's true, we will be seeing more and more young adults switching to hard liquor.

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