e should have seen it coming. The Aperol Spritz has been
somehow, is a thing now: Seedlip, a boozeless juniper-infused “spirit,” strives to make teetotaling less taboo. High-end restaurant menus answer the call with mocktails that photograph like the real thing – typically better, actually – but hit like a Shirley Temple, lest the mind behind the phone lens lose focus. Beer sales are also in a five-year slump. Millennial #soberlife is probably a healthy development. The surgeon general has never actually recommended getting shitfaced. Alcohol consumption has been known to fuzz up one’s thinking, and we all carry rectangles in our pockets with the power to broadcast and amplify our least lucid ideas. Drinking less makes good social sense in the digital age... Which is roughly what market analysts conclude when pressed to explain millennials’ rising interest in nonalcoholic beer, let alone the surging demand for such a substance among the same demographic that used to buy more alcoholic beer – as one did not used to have to specify – than any other. “Control” is what the social mediaite seeks, according to an analysis of alcohol trends from the marketing research firm Mintel. “Control has become a key watchword for today’s younger drinkers,” according to Jonny Forsyth, Mintel’s food and drink analyst: “Unlike previous cohorts, their nights out are documented through photos, videos and posts across social media where it is likely to remain for the rest of their lives. Over-drinking is therefore something many seek to avoid.” A sense of constant surveillance is to blame... surveillance not by Siri, but by each other’s prying eyes. In a world where everyone’s on the verge of posting a picture that your boss,
cropping up for a couple years on menus where before it would have looked hilariously out of place: I’ll venture relatively few non-Italians were even aware of the pretty pink aperitivo half a decade ago. But thanks to an aggressive advertising push by its parent company Campari America, #aperolspritz has catapulted to 1.25 million tags on Instagram as of this writing... Campari America splashed the logo across the Hampton Jitney and flooded branded events with Instagram- friendly merch. Now even the late-night pizza place on my overpriced but far-from- fashionable D.C. block has amended its offerings – pints, pitchers, well drinks – to include the spritz, 2019’s favorite drink. Not much of a drink, it combines Aperol (which is like Campari but weaker and somehow sweeter) and Prosecco, and then further weakens them with a splash – sorry, a spritz – of bubbly water. With its sunset-ready hue, Aperol is an easy sell to the itchy-thumbed Instagram addict, and it costs less than a real drink. Which seems fair, seeing as those who order the pinkish-orange beverage in time for sunset’s gentle glow aren’t drinking for alcohol effect... They’re drinking for camera effect. What we seem to be calling, per Sunday Styles, a “spritz craze” also speaks to a longer- running tendency among the digitally native drinker, or non-drinker as the trend would have it: Millennials, the youngest of whom turned 21 two years ago, just don’t get drunk. Demand for non-alcoholic beer is up. And naturally, so is production. Non-alcoholic gin,
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August 2019
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