Australians love to drink. In 2014, the World Health Organisation ranked us the tenth drunkest country in the world. We matched Serbia for the average amount of alcohol consumed per capita, and were the only nation in the top 11 that weren’t located in Eastern Europe.But we're not drinking like we used to.According to data released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, alcohol consumption in Australia has hit a 55-year low. People haven’t been drinking this little since 1962—and that goes for every type of beverage. Beer, wine, spirits, cider, and ready-to-drink pre-mixes are all going through a steady decrease in popularity.So how much are we actually drinking? Well, in 2016-17 the average Australian over the age of 15 consumed about 9.4 litres of alcohol. That’s the rough equivalent of a single person downing 224 stubbies of beer, 38 bottles of wine, 17 bottles of cider, four bottles of spirits and 33 cans of premixed drinks in a single year, according to the ABS.“If you keep in mind that around one in five Australians drink very rarely or not at all, that's quite a lot for the rest of us,” the Bureau notes. “Notwithstanding the amounts discarded or used for non-drinking purposes."Relative to past generations, though, it’s a drop in the bucket. Australia’s peak alcohol consumption was in the year of 1974-75 during which the amount of alcohol consumed per capita was 13.1 litres and the average person imbibed some 500 stubbies. ABS director of health statistics Louise Gates describes this as the point when Australia reached “peak beer”.The nation’s love of frothies has plunged fairly steadily since then, with more drinkers shifting towards a wine-based diet. In 2016-17, wine trailed beer as the second most popular beverage by less than one percent.“Over three-quarters of alcohol consumed was from either beer (39 percent) or wine (38 percent),” the Bureau reported. “And while alcohol consumed from wine has declined recently, the drop in beer consumption has been the main driver for falling alcohol consumption with an average decline of 2.4 percent per year over the last 10 years."The CEO of the Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education Michael Thorn thinks the downward slide in alcohol consumption among Australians is most likely influenced by the growing demographic of young people who are choosing to hold off on the drink for longer than their predecessors."Young drinkers, and I mean those under the age of 18… are delaying the time at which they commence drinking and they're drinking less alcohol,” he told the ABC. “Some of them are continuing on into their 20s as abstainers."
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