Alcohol
Beer, wine, spirits, cider & mixers · 10 stories
Korea's Shorter Workweek Is Quietly Killing Its Drinking Culture — And Zero-Alcohol Brands Are Cashing In
Korea's booming zero-alcohol market isn't primarily a health-and-wellness story — it's structurally caused by the country adopting a 4.5-day workweek (Asia's largest such experiment), which is directly shrinking the traditional after-wor...
Non-Alcoholic Beer Is Splitting Into Two Completely Different Products
Non-alcoholic beer has quietly split into two very different innovation tracks — one making beer taste more like beer (Athletic Brewing's first nitro release), and one turning beer into a functional wellness product entirely, with a neur...
Why Corona's Non-Alcoholic Beer Got Its Own Olympic Sponsorship
Corona — a brand built entirely on tropical-beach escapism — turned its non-alcoholic version into a functional-nutrition product (vitamin D fortified) and landed an official Olympic partnership for it specifically, treating the alcohol-...
Meet the 'Zebra Striper': The Gen Z Drinking Pattern Reshaping the Beer Aisle
Nearly 8 in 10 Gen Z drinkers now deliberately alternate between alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks across a single night out — not to avoid drinking, but specifically to stay out longer without the physical toll — a behavior pattern the...
Why the Middle East Refuses to Call Non-Alcoholic Beer 'Beer'
In the Middle East, non-alcoholic 'beer' isn't marketed as beer at all — brands like Barbican (Saudi Arabia) and Moussy Classic (UAE) are deliberately positioned as 'foamless malt-based drinks,' a genuine category-naming distinction driv...
The Two Totally Different Ways to Brew a Beer With No Alcohol In It
There are two fundamentally different ways to make non-alcoholic beer — brew it so it never really becomes alcoholic in the first place, or brew a normal beer and then strip the alcohol back out — and the market leader built its entire c...
Why Japan's 'Slowest-Growing' Non-Alcoholic Beer Market Is Actually Its Most Successful
Japan's non-alcoholic beer market is projected to grow the slowest of any major country researched (5.6% CAGR vs. India's 8.8% and China's 8.2%) — not because Japanese consumers want it least, but because the category is already so matur...
The Wine Brand That Won an Award for Inventing a New Category, Not a New Wine
An industry award body named a brand 'Innovator of the Year' specifically for creating an entirely new wine category from scratch — a high-ABV wine drink explicitly designed to attract people who don't currently drink wine at all, rather...
Gin Brands Are Pulling in Two Opposite Directions at Once
A major gin brand's newest launch isn't gin at all in the traditional sense — it's an 8.4% ABV ready-to-drink spritz format sold in 75cl multi-serve bottles, while a smaller Welsh distillery is going the opposite direction entirely with ...
Why a Famous Japanese Beer Brand's First US Product Isn't Beer
A major Japanese beer brand's first-ever US-manufactured product isn't beer at all — it's a vodka-based ready-to-drink cocktail made at a Wisconsin facility, signaling beer companies are treating 'beer-adjacent' RTD categories as a genui...