Are booze declines structural, cyclical... or a secret third thing?

If you have tuned into an earnings call or attended a beverage-alcohol trade webinar over the past three to five years—I have done both, to my great chagrin—you have heard executives and economists use a specific phrase to reassure Wall Street analysts and maybe also themselves that everything will be fine.

“Category trends are cyclical,” said Danelle Kosmal, the Beer Institute’s then-vice president of research, in April 2023, framing up another year-over-year decline in tax-paid estimates on shipped beer.

“We still don’t see it as anything structural,” Bill Newlands, the CEO of Constellation Brands, said in January 2025, explaining on the firm’s quarterly call why the firm it just revised down its fiscal guidance. “We don’t see it as long-term issues attached to this business.”

“Are [Zoomers] also moderating [because] they just don’t have enough money to spend?” wondered Diageo’s interim CEO Nik Jhangiani at the Barclays Global Consumer Staples Conference in September 2025. “Is that a trend that’s a continued one, or is that a trend that will reverse because that’s linked to more of the cyclical or the macroeconomic issue?”

Cyclical vs. structural. At the upper echelons of the bev-alc industry, debate over the nature of the trade’s slow but sustained decline has been a favorite pastime for the its biggest business brains. These are economic assessments freighted with existential angst. If sales slides are cyclical, then the return to growth is around the bend. The word’s tequila tycoons, red-blending barons, and moguls of malt are soon to reap the fruits of hard-nosed business decisions (read: layoffs, fire sales, panic mergers) made in these lean years. They make their bonuses, their shareholders make those sweet gains, and everybody happily goes back to fighting one another out of intra-industry rivalry, rather than desperation to steal one another’s shrinking shelf space. (Except for the laid-off workers of course, whose lives are often upended by c-suites’ reflexive, self-serving, contagious cuts. Alas.) But if they are structural? Well, the world needs ditch diggers, too.

What if—and I’m just spitballing here—these weren’t the only two lenses for understanding the bev-alc market’s present malaise?

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