Britain’s on the rocks – no wonder we’re hitting the cocktails | Richard Godwin

With cocktails booming in popularity, it appears they may be a link between hard times and hard liquor

It is far from an exact science, taking a nation's pulse from what it's drinking. Cocktail sociology tends, alas, to be looked down upon by the Academy. The field is sadly overreliant on the datasets of second-rate spiced rum brands. Still, cocktails are, apparently, selling in record numbers: they accounted for almost one-tenth of alcohol sales in bars and restaurants between April and October 2020, compared with 6% before the pandemic; and the at-home cocktail market has grown 44% year on year. Why the explosion in popularity? As someone who has spent a few negronis correlating vermouth trends with socio-economic factors, I think there are two conclusions to draw.

The first is that the British will use anything as an excuse to drink: crash, plague, war, depression, we're not fussy. At-home sales of alcohol increased by 24% in the year from March 2020. Not only did at-home drinking nearly cancel out the losses of bars and restaurants during lockdown (overall alcohol sales were only down by 1.2%), it changed what we were drinking: the five o'clock cocktail ritual became an anchor amid the amorphous days and a proxy for all the things we couldn't do: travel, socialise, laugh. It's also far less effort making a margarita than making sourdough. As a result, beer was down 14%; spirits were up 7.3%. Waitrose reported that pandemic tequila sales went up by 175% with liqueur sales rising by 78%.

Richard Godwin is the author of The Spirits and writes a weekly newsletter about cocktails at thespirits.substack.com