Comment by gib444 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gib444 | Hacker News Reader

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> Alcohol is just in a structural decline

Seem so on the whole in Europe in higher-income countries. But the decline seems to be slowing.

(It is surprisingly difficult to find annual alcohol consumption statistics on google. It feels like swimming upstream. It keeps giving me data on alcohol-associated deaths, or total alcohol+tobacco spending!)

WHO dataset, alcohol pure litres total per capita annual [0]

Switzerland (4th biggest decrease):

2020: 11.4 litres

2024: 8.8 litres

UK:

2000: 12.3 litres

2024: 10.4 litres

Ireland:

2000: 14.78 litres

2024: 10.27 litres

There are some countries which have seen an increase over that time period:

Bulgaria +2.33

Latvia +1.99

Portugal +2.10

Moldova +4.14

Bosnia and Herzegovina +1.86

[0] https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/indicators/indicator-detai...

10 litres alcohol is about 100 bottles of wine a year (exactly 100 at 13.33% alcohol content).

I drink a lot of wine, but 1 full bottle is too much to have regularly. A half bottle - two generous glasses - is more reasonable, but you'll still feel it the next day. And 10 litres of alcohol puts you at 8 generous glasses a week.

I reckon this is still quite a lot of alcohol.

> surprisingly difficult to find annual alcohol consumption statistics on google. It feels like swimming upstream.

Seems like the WHO might not have generated a per country per capita alcohol consumption dataset after 2020? Imagine COVID + US defunding in 2025 (~20% of budget) caused a lot of turmoil in lower priorities. :(

Average person drinks 9 litres of alcohol per year factoid actualy just statistical error. average person drinks 3 litres per year. Wendt Georg aka "Norm", who spends the majority of his life in a bar in Boston is an outlier adn should not have been counted

NORM!

I wondered how demographic change was affecting this, and it does appear to be the case that 20% of that change in the UK is due to the Muslim population doubling.

Over double. 1.5m in 2001 to 3.9m in 2021, estimated 4.1m today though I think that's a slight underestimate given recent immigration

No idea about direct attribution to the UK's alcohol consumption though

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