The shadow of a palm frond falls on a young woman in a bikini, holding an emerald-coloured cocktail in one manicured hand. A negroni glows from the depths of a darkened bar; a tray of fruit-laden glasses sits beside a swimming pool. The #cocktail hashtag on Instagram is a passport to a magical land of aspirational drinking, where everything comes garnished with rose petals and nobody ever seems to get hangovers.
Its inhabitants are a mix of amateur enthusiasts reviewing their latest discoveries, and professional “ginfluencers” making a living from creating lusciously photographed cocktail recipes or sponsored posts promoting this rhubarb gin or that new tequila. Colourful drinks are popular, says Inka Kukkamäki, a full-time drinks influencer whose @onthesauceagain account has 21,000 Instagram followers. “Something a bit interesting and unusual, or just something simple like a negroni – any kind of negroni twist becomes popular. The Italian aperitivo culture has really spread into the UK in the last year.”
Originally from Finland, but married to a Scot and living near Florence in Italy, the 33-year-old splits her time between distillery visits or tastings, devising recipes for her blog and social media accounts, and advising food and drink brands on social media management. An entry-level influencer, she explains, might be sent free bottles to review and write about. But the real money is in working with alcohol brands on paid campaigns, a lightly disguised form of advertising, although she insists she only chooses brands she genuinely likes in order to retain readers’ trust. Influencers have, she thinks, clearly affected pandemic drinking habits. “No one could go to bars, they start having drinks at home, but don’t want to use the same old bottle of wine and maybe you miss cocktails – so they turn to Instagram and get ideas, and follow the people they feel more connected to.”
This has been the year of the home cocktail, shaken up to enliven Friday night Zoom with friends or mark the end of an otherwise formless day’s working from home. And the habit seems to be sticking now lockdown is over. Waitrose recently reported a 148% rise in sales of the Italian aperitif Aperol this July compared with last year, and a similar leap in searches for its online espresso martini recipe.
David Powlson, a 44-year-old consultant in paper production, got the bug in lockdown when his west London running club could no longer hold its monthly pub meet-ups, switching to virtual beer, wine and cocktail tastings instead. “Since then I’ve continued making one pretty much every night,” says Powlson, who favours mint juleps. “You feel like you’ve learned something as well – you start looking things up on YouTube.” Social media has helped demystify the whole process, with mixology videos booming on TikTok and furloughed bartenders offering private Zoom lessons in martini-making.
Catrin Roberts, who works for the Welsh television channel S4C, became part of a Saturday night cocktail-making rota among neighbours on her Cardiff street during lockdown. It started, she says, as a spin-off from cooking more elaborate meals to entertain her five-year-old triplets. “We made the children prawn cocktails and they kept asking for that, and one weekend my husband said: ‘Why don’t we make cocktails for ourselves?’” Not long after, she left one on the doorstep of a neighbour living alone; before long, several households were swapping weekly daiquiris and caipirinhas in a Covid-safe manner. “We’d text to say: ‘There’s a vitamin supply on your doorstep,’” says Roberts, who scoured the internet for new recipes. “We make different ones, that’s been the good thing – we’ve discovered new cocktails and found out a lot more about people on our street.”
Like Powlson, who sometimes halves the alcohol in a recipe, she says they are “relatively measured” about their intake. But having lost their sense of taste to Covid, spirits were one of the first things she and her doctor husband could taste again, and cocktails felt like “a celebratory thing” in dark times. Three units of alcohol is still three units, but drinking it from a pretty salt-rimmed glass feels more elegant. The rituals of muddling and measuring elevate it beyond the realms of just getting sloshed – even if that’s exactly what an alarming number of us have been doing.
The Rev Richard Coles, the radio presenter and author, recently lost his partner to alcohol addiction and, speaking to the Radio Times in June, warned against the “glamorisation” of booze, calling for TV dramas to bring “realism to a distorted picture” of “how we poison ourselves” with alcohol. More people die worldwide from alcohol than cocaine, he pointed out, reflecting the former’s status as a legal, socially acceptable and frequently romanticised drug.
Contrary to popular belief, alcohol consumption fell in England during the first lockdown and held steady in Scotland, according to a study from the Alcohol Research Group at the University of Sheffield. But headline figures conceal more complex individual stories. Andrew Misell of the charity Alcohol Change UK, which campaigns for better treatment for addicts – and for Britons to drink by considered choice not default – says about one-third of people drank more than normal in lockdown, with similar numbers drinking less and the rest seeing no change. But one in four adults in England and Scotland were already drinking over the chief medical officers’ low-risk guidelines of no more than 14 units pre-Covid, and Misell says it’s heavy drinkers who were more likely to increase their intake in the privacy of lockdown.
“There has always been a thing in this country about boasting about drinking,” he says. “It goes across the whole spectrum from blatant bragging about how smashed you were last night, through to more polite euphemisms and mock regret the next day.” Birthday cards revolve around beer, gin and prosecco jokes, while the high street is awash with booze-themed mugs, coasters and cushions. Over the past decade, says Misell, a popular culture that normalises overdoing it has merged with an online culture of glossing over negatives, which teaches us to share elegant pictures of clinking champagne flutes rather than ugly images of the morning after. “You have the perfect storm, which is the tendency of social media to make us want to present a much better version of ourselves than is actually true, along with our national tendency to make jokes about alcohol,” says Misell.
And all this happens in a commercial grey area where Facebook mums posting about #wineoclock rub shoulders with bars advertising happy hour, conventional brand adverts, and influencers plugging #sponsored content. Accounts like @onthesauceagain carry warnings that they’re for over-18s only, and use the #responsibledrinking hashtag; since her posts emphasise quality over quantity, Kukkamäki says she isn’t worried about her readers overdoing it. “When I drink cocktails, I can’t drink much – you maybe have two and that’s it.” But not everyone is so responsible.
The Advertising Standards Authority’s code on alcohol marketing – which bans the linking of booze to sex, violence, irresponsible behaviour or improved mood – applies to alcohol marketing online, and its reach does extend beyond conventional ads. In 2018, it rebuked the Scottish Gin Society (representing gin producers) for sharing Facebook memes including: “Shut up liver, you’re fine! Gin?” and: “I only drink gin on two occasions: when I’m thirsty and when I’m not thirsty”, prompting the organisation to complain of “po-faced, fun-free, nanny state judgment”.
But similarly booze-soaked content produced and shared by millions of ordinary users is virtually impossible to regulate, and that too can have an impact.
“We’re doing half the job of the alcohol marketing companies for them, because we’re the ones who share the pictures – the Aperol spritzes on holiday or whatever,” says the writer and sobriety campaigner Catherine Gray, whose 2017 bestseller The Unexpected Joys of Being Sober made the case for positively choosing not to drink. She hasn’t touched alcohol for almost eight years but says even she struggled early on with summery images of Pimm’s and strawberries, or ice-cold ciders in a beer garden.
When she first quit, she recalls, the most common response was pity. “It was: ‘Poor you, that must be terrible, what happened?’ It was still that very binary black-and-white thing of two types of drinkers: normal drinkers who get to carry on, woo hoo; and alcoholics who have to quit and live a terrible life. There was no other story.” Her new book, Sunshine Warm Sober, is however a paean to the longer-term pleasures of staying booze-free in a world she thinks is changing, where not-drinking is beginning to look aspirational too.
“In this country we treat alcohol like it’s another food group, an essential part of life – every teenager, it’s assumed they’re going to grow up to be drinkers,” says Gray. “But a lot of them aren’t now. Rates of drinking are even lower among generation Z than among millennials.” And lockdown may, she argues, have given more of the so-called “sober curious” – people flirting with quitting – a chance to stop without having to explain themselves to friends. Even the original 90s party animal Kate Moss is now teetotal, she points out, and the drinks industry is increasingly investing in alcohol-free brands to suit changing tastes. In a few decades’ time, Gray argues, boozing might become more like smoking; not the unthinking norm, but something a minority choose to do.
But if that idea is too much to swallow, perhaps Britons are at least beginning to recognise that there is more than one path to #goodtimes, leading to more honest conversations about how and why we drink. Who wouldn’t raise a glass to that?