Decoding zoomer/boomer bev-alc doomerism

For the past few years, you have probably heard a lot about how Gen Z isn’t drinking. Those damn kids and their sober-curiosity! You know the routine. This was never as true as mainstream-media outlets presented it, as I’ve reported extensively. Much like lazy reporters spent last decade poisoning Facebook users’ brains by writing the same “millennials can’t afford houses because they spend all their money on avocado toast” story over and over again, the received wisdom that zoomers aren’t interested in alcohol has generated a lot of stupid headlines and discourse. And this has happened while the changing consumption habits of a much older demographic—and one much more pivotal to the beverage-alcohol trade at the moment—have gotten precious little attention from the corporate business sheets.

Today on The Fingers Podcast I’m joined by Kate Bernot, a longtime bev-alc journalist and the lead analyst at Feel Goods Insights, a beverage strategy newsletter. She previously graced the boozeletter with her presence about a year ago to discuss American winemakers’ ongoing inability to get out of their own way. In this episode, we talked instead about what will happen to the booze business when the youngest of the boomers—a massive generation, and one in which a truly appalling amount of the nation’s wealth is still concentrated—hit retirement age and adjust their drinking accordingly. As Kate’s recent reporting suggests: probably nothing good! Come for the zoomer-boomer doomerism, stay for the K-shaped economic recovery conundrum, and crack a beer when we start shitting on CPG brands slopping it up with generative AI. It’s generation all the way down, bay-bee!

🎧 Listen to the episode

Good news: since the last episode of The Fingers Podcast, Beehiiv (the platform I use to publish the boozeletter) finally rolled out native podcast feeds! This means no more jumping through hoops to listen to my interviews with interesting people from the wild world of booze and beyond.

The Fingers Podcast is exclusively for paying subscribers, and there are two ways to listen:

I’m working on getting the The Fingers Podcast archive back online, too. There were some real bangers in there! More to come soon.

💡 A few highlights from the episode

The transcript excerpts below have been edited for length and clarity. This interview was recorded May 21st, 2026.

On the ticking boomer retirement bomb…

Infante: What's the meaning of life? I don't know, but the meaning of death is that you can't buy any more alcohol. So we need to talk a little bit about that, because when Boomer drinkers are gone, they gone. Right, Kate?

Bernot: Right. Even the ones that are not exiting this mortal plane are aging into retirement at very significant rates. The youngest boomers may not be retired yet, the oldest almost certainly are. People are working longer than that traditional 62 to 65 these days. But even given that we're going to see this huge wave of boomer retirements that's happening now, and will kind of accelerate through about 2040. Even if you are a very well-off boomer who moves from a working life into retirement, you're just going to probably be drinking less volume, and also you're looking at now a fixed income. Even if you’ve still got money in the bank, you’ve got your house or two or three, you're still going to kind of look at your budget differently. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that per capita spending on alcohol drops as pretty significantly after people turn 75, so as the boomers en masse age into that, I would expect a huge suck of dollars out of the alcohol market.

On the trade’s challenge to inculcate Gen Z in drinking rituals…

Bernot: Boomers enjoyed, for the most part, very stable, linear, traditional careers where they were amassing retirement savings, had health insurance, and were supporting families on two kind of robust incomes.

Infante: Many of them earned literal pensions; those go off a cliff in the younger generations.

Bernot: Right. So boomers are being replaced by consumers who have a very different cultural attitude towards alcohol. But Zoomers are also just are lacking some of the career and therefore kind of life stability that would make premium alcohol really accessible to them. Gen Z is doing gig work, they're putting together a lot of different part-time jobs to kind of stay afloat. They haven't been acculturated into alcohol consumption patterns the way boomers were, and part of that is through the workplace. There's an acculturation that happens there, and for boomers, regardless of what kind of jobs they had, that often did involve a lot of alcohol. If you’re Gen Z, if you're working those multiple jobs, or you work remotely, that doesn't come with the same kind of post-work alcohol consumption that it would have for prior generations. You miss out on that generational knowledge and norm transfer.

On CPG companies using AI…

Infante: AI polls worse than ISIS, but Narragansett was out there fucking slopping it up on Facebook and getting screamed at. Here’s a free tip: don't do that shit!

Bernot: There is this incredibly wrong perception about AI that it is a technology, and young people like technology. And it's like, “No, we're way past that.” Gen Z is is demonstrably interested in tactile, real-world, non-digital experiences. Look at the return of like crafting, coloring, DIY, thrifting, whatever. All of that is very driven by young people. There’s this weird perception that young people sit at home on Facebook. Like, no, like my dad sits at home on Facebook. We know that the younger generations prefer a stamp of humanity, even or especially if it means imperfection, right? Those moments of humanity are really important and really gratifying and reinforcing to consumers. Lean into that, not away from it. No one wants more digital interfaces between them and a good time.

🗣️ Previously on The Fingers Interview…

Since starting The Fingers Interview series back up, I’ve spoken with:

• Ferron Salniker (BevNET) and Kevin McGee (attorney) on how Uncle Nearest wound up in dire straits

• Christopher Lackner (Hemp Beverage Alliance) on the road to redemption on Capitol Hill and much more

• Lisa Jacobson (UC Santa Barbara) on the booze industry's post-Repeal redemption

• Senator Tina Smith on how opponents "snuck" the ban into law, shady brands' "bullshit" products, and the industry's paths to redemption

• Ned Resnikoff (PUBLIC COMMENT) on optimizing cities for fewer cars and more corner bars

• Bourcard Nesin (Rabobank) on the myth that Gen Z isn’t drinking

• Kate Bernot (Sightlines) on the battles the wine industry should and shouldn’t be fighting

Before I wound it down, I spoke with a bunch of very interesting folks from inside the booze business, and beyond it. Including:

• Michael Graham (Austin Beerworks) on running a brewery in a boomtown

• Jerard Fagerberg (journalist-at-large) on on Minnesota's THC seltzer "gold rush"

• Mary Guiver (Whole Foods) on hard milk, good stories, and scouting booze trends

• Dan Ozzi (Sellout) on the music industry, the stigma of “selling out,” and more

• Allyson Brantley, Ph.D., (University of La Verne) on the historic Coors boycott, the pitfalls of consumer activism without endpoints, and more

• Benjamin Lorr (The Secret Life of Groceries, Hell-Bent) on supermarkets, marketing, fearsome power of commodity, and more

• Jason Diamond (The Sprawl, Searching for John Hughes) on “The Swimmer” and getting drunk in the suburbs

And probably a few more that I missed as I navigated the depths of the archives.