Welcome to the Mocktail Era
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Drinking can often feel sewn into the fabric of your twenties—the glittery, alcohol-fueled nights on the town, hazy after-work happy hours, and raucous Saturday morning bottomless brunches are ubiquitous in our culture. But some of today’s twenty-somethings are rewriting that script. “Among Gen Z, the proportion of people who choose not to drink is increasing by about half a percentage point annually. All these years add up,” says Ziming Xuan, a social epidemiologist and associate professor of community health sciences at Boston University. Some of the most recent numbers, from a 2020 study published in Jama Pediatrics, show that 28 percent of college students in 2018 reported abstaining from alcohol, while that number was at only 20 percent in 2002. “We have a larger proportion of people who choose not to drink. And for those who choose to drink, they drink less,” Xuan says.
When I polled my own Instagram followers looking for Gen Zers or young millennials who don’t drink, I was surprised when enthusiastic DMs poured in from nearly 40 people. What’s driving the trend? For starters, their health. We’re now long past the days of “Red wine is good for you”—in January of 2023, the World Health Organization published a warning that no amount of alcohol is safe for our health.
Excessive alcohol use causes 178,000 deaths annually and is linked to increased risk of developing many different kinds of cancer, including breast cancer, according to the CDC. It’s also a depressant: While a cocktail may help someone feel more relaxed or confident at first, it can disrupt the balance of neurotransmitters and ultimately make people feel more anxious. “The effect that alcohol has on physical health and mental health are really evident,” says Hilary Sheinbaum, author of Going Dry. “I think that, more than ever, people are very wellness-focused and concerned about longevity.”
Nearly two-thirds of British consumers between the ages of 18 and 24 are worried about the emotional impact of alcohol, according to a Mintel survey from 2023. Junia Lebek, a 26-year-old graduate student and “retired party girl,” says she stopped drinking her junior year of college. “The big reason was that my mental health got so bad that [alcohol was] the only coping mechanism,” she says.
Now sober for more than five years, she says she has never felt physically or mentally better. Freelance writer Mary Honkus, 27, says she began to abstain after “I started to notice that anytime that I would drink, my hangovers weren’t just physical. They had a very serious emotional effect. I would find myself in depressive states that would last for weeks. And I wasn’t the kind of person who drank every day; I was a social drinker who went out on the weekends.”
If Gen X grew up thinking drinking was cool, some of their kids see it the opposite way: More than half of Gen Zers worry about how too much drinking might make them look online, according to market research from the British agencies Red Brick Road and Opinium. “I’m not super interested in being out of control of my body,” says Nat Segebre, 25, a photographer and creative director who was inspired by the punk straight edge subculture to stop drinking. It was similar for Jade Corona, a 23-year-old publicist: “As someone who likes to be in control, I felt like [alcohol] would take me out of control. I just didn’t think it was cool.”
Gen Z also doesn’t appear to care about adhering to social norms like drinking in the same way that previous generations did. An EY survey found that 92 percent of Gen Z members think it’s important to be authentic. And as one of the most inclusive generations, those in Gen Z don’t feel constrained by stereotypes, according to a McKinsey & Company study. This may lead to more tolerance for people who have different drinking patterns. “In the movies, you see people getting pressure to drink, that kind of rhetoric,” says Carol Lee, 24, associate e-commerce writer for ELLE.com, who doesn’t imbibe. “I’ve never felt that. For my friends, if I wasn’t drinking, that was that.”
An influx of nonalcoholic options makes it easier to abstain. Instead of being cordoned off to a decidedly unsexy corner of a drink menu, mocktails now often get an entire page of their own. The options are better, too—rather than juice with seltzer or a Heineken 0.0, mocktails may come in martini glasses, garnished with sprigs of rosemary and finished with a twist, and have names like the “Venetian Holiday” or the “Summer Vacation” (both on the menu at NYC’s iconic, Gatsby-esque Bar Room at the Beekman hotel). Luxury powerhouse LVMH’s liquor division, Möet Hennessy, recently invested in a minority stake in the nonalcoholic wine brand French Bloom. Bottled and canned options like Ghia, a nonalcoholic aperitif brand founded by
Mélanie Masarin, and Kin Euphorics, a refresher filled with nootropics and adaptogens, created by Jen Batchelor and Bella Hadid (who is Gen Z-adjacent herself), also draw in a younger crowd.
“We don’t really want to be a wellness drink,” Masarin says. “We want to be a happy drink. I think so much of that is also changing the stigma around not drinking, the idea that you need alcohol as a social lubricant.” Kin, which is infused with ingredients like Rhodiola rosea (which can improve energy and focus) and L-theanine (which may help ease anxiety), takes a similar approach. Some bars have taken note: Rent Money Lounge in New York’s Lower East Side is a “functional alternative lounge” that serves coffee in the morning and transitions into a nonalcoholic lounge at night. Founder Danielle Chiz says she’s gotten positive feedback from many young patrons. “It feels like you can still participate in the night,” she says, “without having to drink.”
Calme
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Kin Bloom
A version of this story appears in the December 2024/January 2025 issue of ELLE.
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