British beer and wine are getting weaker, according to a new study, with the average strength of a can or bottle dropping by around one per cent since 2022.
Researchers from the University of Sheffield say the fall is equivalent to 14.2 million pints of alcohol going undrunk in the UK by the end of last year.
The study looked at data on six million alcohol purchases made by 30,000 families to work out how changes to the law in 2022 may have affected what people buy and drink.
New duty laws introduced that year encourage brewers to cut the alcohol content of their products to pay less tax. The researchers say those laws are partly behind the shift.
Before the tax and duty changes, the average alcohol content of all drinks stayed steady at between 17.2 and 17.7 per cent. After the changes, it dropped to 16.6 per cent by the end of last year.
Beer fell from an average of 4.5 per cent in 2022 to 4.4 per cent last year. Wine dropped from 12.6 per cent to 12.3 per cent, and spirits from 36.5 per cent to 36.2 per cent over the same period.
The biggest change came in lower-strength beer. Previously just three per cent of beer drunk in Britain was below 3.5 per cent alcohol. By last year that had risen to 18.1 per cent, close to one fifth of the entire beer market.
That amounts to a five-fold increase in the number of low-strength beers being drunk. But the researchers say the trend is not simply because Britons are drinking more carefully.
The team said the changes will have "clear implications for public health".
Alcohol remains a leading risk factor for ill health and early death. More than 10,000 people died from alcohol-related causes in 2023, the highest figure on record.
Professor Colin Angus, Professor of Alcohol Policy at the University of Sheffield, who led the study, said the findings showed a "clear appetite" for lower-strength drinks.
"Lowering the strength of alcoholic products is likely to have a positive impact on public health as there is evidence from experimental studies that when drinking lower-strength drinks, we tend to drink less alcohol overall," Angus said.
"We estimate, under optimistic assumptions, that the fall in average product strength may reduce average alcohol consumption by 2.7 per cent since 2022."
He added that alcohol-specific deaths remain around 25 per cent higher than they were in 2019.
"This would be a significant change, however alcohol-specific deaths remain around 25 per cent higher than they were just a few years ago in 2019, so we shouldn't expect that reformulation alone can tackle these high rates of alcohol harms," Angus said.
Writing in Drug and Alcohol Review, the researchers said they could not be certain the 2022 duty changes had caused drinks to become weaker.
They found one in 20 alcoholic drinks had been reformulated to contain less alcohol in recent years.
But they added that "the clear timing association between the reforms and increased reformulation activity, strongly suggests that the reforms have played at least some role in driving an increase in reformulations".
Source: Daily Mail
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