Stress-testing the “Zoomers be drinking less” thesis

Editor’s note: Based on the popularity of The Fingers Interview with Kate Bernot last month, I’ve decided to reintroduce them into the publishing schedule more regularly. Specifically: today. Hope you like it. Don’t forget to vote for the Buzzwords of The Week of the Quarter!—Dave.

For the past few years, the beverage-alcohol business has been whipping itself into an existential frenzy over Gen Z. These damn Zoomers! cry America’s brewers, distillers, and winemakers. (Especially winemakers.) Why aren’t they drinking at the same rates as Millennials, Gen Xers, and our big, beautiful Boomers?! Has sober curiosity killed the cat, wherein the cat is me?!

Alright, maybe that’s a slight editorialization. But while the tenor of the industry’s collective “kids today” struggle session is less colorful, its urgency is very real. “Is a craft brewery’s ‘story’ important to Gen Z?” asked an attendee of one of the panel sessions I attended at the Brewers Association’s annual Craft Brewers Conference in Indianapolis last week. Producers across all three categories are asking themselves—and their data teams, and their trade-group leaders, and even their own damn Zoomers at home—versions of this question.

Bourcard Nesin, senior beverage analyst at the Dutch agribank Rabobank, has been suspicious of that question’s underlying premise for years. “A lot of the research out there was unsatisfying,” he told Fingers in a recent phone interview. “There were a lot of simplistic narratives and deeply generalized things about Gen Z that didn't make a lot of sense to me.” (Ditto.) Nesin dug into a bunch of data to stress-test the “Zoomers be drinking less” thesis that has dominated mainstream headlines for the past half-decade, and his findings—free to read in his report for Rabobank last month—offer a thorough, persuasive counterpoint to all the industry agita about The Yoots. With his report the talk of the trade, I interviewed Nesin to hear more about his approach to the research, his hope for what the trade will do with it, and much more.

Below is an edited and condensed transcript of our conversation.

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