The west wall of the dining room at the Last Refuge, a bar and restaurant in a 145-year-old former church in Louisville, Ky., is 25 feet high and displays roughly 1,300 kinds of whiskey, many of them produced in and around this city, a center of the American spirits industry since the 19th century. Against prediction and entirely unprompted, the person waiting for me there on an early summer evening was not directed by her server to a private-stock bourbon at $58 an ounce or a simple aperitif, but rather a selection of zero-proof cocktails.
“You’d be surprised by how many people around here don’t drink,” our waitress shared with us later.
My dinner companion worked for the Louisville mayor’s office. She had given up drinking several years ago in the name of better sleep and general well-being, leaving her vulnerable to the joke that she was part of the problem in a city where the national retreat from alcohol was driving a list of anxieties.
I had come to Louisville to gauge the collateral effects of this growing aversion, a reality propelled by science, supported by surveys and punctuated by my own experience as a host who had noticed that a longstanding dictum of entertaining — the allotment of a half bottle of wine per guest — no longer applied. For all the benefits of cutting back, certain rituals were vanishing, and it was hard not to wonder what else the temperance revival had carried away with it.
In Kentucky, the answers can seem fairly straightforward. Last year, Brown-Forman, the maker of Jack Daniel’s, among other liquors and a vital benefactor of the city’s cultural life, announced it was laying off 12 percent of its work force. As part of its restructuring, the company closed its Louisville cooperage, where whiskey barrels were manufactured for 80 years; 210 jobs were cut. In nearby Clermont, Jim Beam halted bourbon production for the whole year. Trade disputes have brought continuing challenges.
Across the country, sales of wine, beer and liquor, by volume, have been steadily decreasing: in 2023 falling 3 percent over the previous year; in 2025, 5 percent. I.W.S.R., the British research firm that ran these numbers, anticipates an 18 percent drop over the next decade. Data from the beer industry show the craft brewing work force in decline.
Employment metrics are just part of a calculus that counts consequences to ecosystems that are dependent on the habits that have fueled human fellowship for most of recorded time. From the birth of the public house in the 16th century to the revolution for gay rights, which began at the Stonewall Inn, alcohol has shaped the social politics of urban life. In tandem with new restaurants over the past 15 to 20 years, taprooms have drawn people to once sparsely populated downtowns. This was true of Angel City Brewery in the Los Angeles Arts District, which closed in April. Regulars mourned the loss of community it signaled. On the Fourth of July, Trim Tab Brewery in a revitalized section of Birmingham, Ala., closed after 13 years, ending its tenure as an exhibition and performance space. Many cities have had similar closures.
The realignment is testament to the power of messaging coming from various corners of the medical establishment, messaging that has convinced many Americans that even a few glasses of Sancerre a week can lead to serious illness and death. Three years ago, the World Health Organization declared that no amount of alcohol is safe. The push accelerated here in January 2025 when the United States surgeon general at the time, Vivek Murthy, warned that alcohol leads to a greater absorption of carcinogens, increasing the risk of at least seven types of cancer. Some figures in public health argue that enjoyment — the delight taken in drinking and the sociality it can afford — should not be overlooked. Their voices have had little influence.
Over the past quarter century, about two-thirds of Gallup poll respondents have consistently said they drink wine, beer or liquor regularly or on occasion. Last year, that figure dropped to 54 percent, the lowest in 90 years. Among 18- to 34-year-olds, the number fell to 50 percent. Counterintuitively, Gallup researchers found that the decline did not appear to be caused by a turn toward recreational cannabis.
By most objective measures this retrenchment is for the good. Excessive drinking often leads to terrible outcomes. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention attributes 178,000 deaths each year to the behavior. And of course millions of Americans struggle with addiction. But one sector’s triumph can become another’s existential setback. How high was the civic cost of villainizing restrained drinking? What had we subordinated to the dictates of public health?
These questions were implicit in the criticism of recent municipal initiatives to discourage even controlled drinking. In May, the New York City Health Department introduced a public education campaign, with posters showing a beer bottle labeled: “Cancer risk.” Accompanying it was the tagline, “No chaser, just the truth.”
Wine merchants immediately opposed the ads as alarmist, maintaining that their product was central to the city’s dining and tourist life — that reducing it to a public health warning “ignored its enormous contribution to our cultural values,” as one distributor told the Wine Enthusiast. Processed meats were linked to colorectal cancer as some pointed out, but the city was not crusading against Katz’s pastrami sandwiches.
Wine stores in the city were already struggling, with some bouncing checks to wholesalers. Unlike coffee bars or drugstores or Brandy Melville, liquor stores retain a distinct place in the city’s commercial makeup, one-offs, frequently family owned, bulwarks against the aggressive encroachment of demoralizing chains.
Restaurants have endured their own story. Alcohol traditionally brings in larger profits than food. “Restaurants can’t simply raise menu prices to offset declining alcohol sales, especially when many customers are already price sensitive,” Andrew Rigie, the director of the NYC Hospitality Alliance, a lobbying group, said. The result has been “serious financial pressure” on small businesses.
In June, bars and restaurants in Cambridge, Mass., successfully fought a proposal from the city’s liquor licensing board that would have limited them to serving people no more than one drink every half-hour. On Instagram, one owner asked people to stand in opposition, unless they wanted “egg timers going off every 30 minutes in every bar and restaurant in Cambridge.”
Similar in spirit was a proposal floating around Louisville that would have forced bars in the Highlands, a neighborhood with an active nightlife culture, into making 70 percent of their earnings in food rather than alcohol. The idea, which arose after chaos and gunfire erupted in the neighborhood, was quickly scratched after many business said that they would be left to close in the event of a ruling like that.
Under the tenure of Mayor Craig Greenberg, Louisville has seen a significant drop in violent crime. At the same time, championing liquor interests is an essential part of his remit — the shelves in his office are lined with bourbon bottles, leaving little confusion. Sitting in his office on a recent visit, he talked about the city’s thriving business in bourbon tourism. Over the past few years it has set records.
But how much the success figures into the industry bottom line is unclear. Louisville’s economy is not broadly diversified, and the mayor acknowledged that while some of the jobs lost to the contraction can be absorbed by different businesses, other roles — “chemists, master distillers” — are highly specialized and not easily transferable. The broader concern, he said, would be that consumer habits changed materially enough that companies left.
It can be hard to find people engaged with Louisville’s civic and cultural life who take the matter of plummeting alcohol sales blithely, or who do not dismissively wave a hand at the thought of young people forgoing the jovial communion of a bar for the dark manipulations of the algorithm. At $10.6 billion, bourbon is one of Kentucky’s largest industries, generating close to 24,000 jobs and $372 million in annual tax revenue.
For decades, the Brown-Forman company has sustained the city’s museums and performing arts through corporate giving and its affiliated foundation. As directors of local cultural organizations will tell you, there is virtually no institution or preservation effort in Louisville that does not bear its imprint. For example, Patrick Lewis, the president of the city’s Filson Historical Society, noted that when Breonna Taylor was fatally shot by a Louisville police officer six years ago, Brown-Forman provided the money for the society to hire a full-time specialist in Black history.
During the last fiscal year, according to the company and tax filings, Brown-Forman gave away more than $14 million, making it among the leaders in local philanthropy. For example, by contrast, Churchill Downs, the host of the Kentucky Derby, distributed less than a quarter of that.
But Brown-Forman is more than a company and a philanthropic wing; it is a web of extended family members, individual executives and friends of the company who hold stock that has lost more than half of its value in the past five years. What most worries the town’s fund-raising class is the fading away of annual donations in the four or five digit range. As one cultural leader explained, the success of bourbon tourism could not compensate for the pronounced downturn in alcohol consumption, which has affected a network critical to supporting the city’s cultural life.
Under the leadership of its prodigy conductor Teddy Abrams, the Louisville Orchestra has been acclaimed as one of the most innovative in the country. “The assumption was always that the Brown family would take care of everything,’’ Abrams said. Despite the company’s support, “my job,” he said “is to hedge against all these things — every changing social convention and market shift.”
It is not the purview of public health officials to think about the ways in which alcohol consumption might affect arts funding. But doctors, therapists and epidemiologists talk a lot about the health costs of loneliness and social isolation in an increasingly virtual age.
Last year, an academic paper published in the journal Addiction by a professor of psychology in Denmark and a public health lecturer in Scotland stood out for its contrarianism, arguing that alcohol research had a “problem with pleasure.” It had been negated, they wrote, naïvely considered an illusion manufactured by advertisers and notable merely for its oppositional relationship to health.
Maybe, they ventured, it was time for a reframing.
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