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- The Super Bowl doesn’t rank as the best holiday for beer retailers (Independence Day typically takes that honor) but as of a few years ago, it was number eight, just below Easter.
- The Super Bowl doesn’t rank as the best holiday for beer retailers (Independence Day typically takes that honor) but as of a few years ago, it was number eight, just below Easter.
Budweiser released this ad to counter the growth of pre-Super Bowl wine sales. (Credit:... [+]
Though Super Bowl viewers will drink far more beer this Sunday than wine or liquor, wine will make a big play for dollars and attention. Pre-game wine sales grew at the same rate as beer last year, and one-fifth of TV viewers say they’ll sip wine while watching. Why? Not only are the two NFL teams taking each other on at a stadium near California wine country, about half of the people watching on TV will be women. Though 20% of drinking women choose beer as their favorite libation, more women also favor wine than do their male counterparts.
Yesterday, Nielsen released some surprising numbers about alcohol consumption around the big game, including the news that wine sales at chain stores climbed 9% in the week leading up to last year’s game. Beer? Also 9%.
“The Super Bowl and beer tend to be tied together in consumers’ minds but consumers are shopping around,” Nielsen Senior Vice President of Beverage Alcohol Danny Brager told the New York Times this week.
1. Americans will drink more than 325m gallons of beer this Sunday, according a frequently circulated yet often questioned calculation attributed to the Stevens Institute of Technology in 2014. Without any more recent, semi-reputable predictions, we’ll say that if true, that amounts to thirty 12-ounce beers for each of the 117m adults who odds-maker Bovada bets will watch the game on TV this year. Given that’s not exactly a reasonable amount, let’s just stay with it long enough to consider the fun fact that Mashable calculates it would take more than seven minutes for that amount of beer to flow over Niagara Falls.
2. More than half of party hosts intend to offer wine and spirits in addition to beer, Nielsen reports, but only one-fifth of party goers expect to drink said wine and just another one-fifth will slam shots or mix cocktails.
3. Beer drinkers spent $583m to stock up in the week leading up to last year’s big game, data research firm IRI reports. Liquor drinkers spent less than one-fifth of that. Yet despite its comparatively low figures, Nielsen found that liquor sales increased almost 11% between that week and the average of the three prior – slightly beating both wine and beer.
5. If their chatter is any indication, fans of the competing teams won’t be drinking much wine at all. According to results from a Nielsen study, Carolina Panthers fans talk most about Heineken and Jack Daniels on social media app BARTRENDr, while Denver Broncos fans fantasize about Bud Light and Bacardi.
6. Regardless of the viewing public’s drink of choice, Sunday will be a day to overeat and possibly over-imbibe. Thanks to Americans’ infamous appetite for gluttony, 7-Eleven owners traditionally ready themselves to sell 20% more of one particular product on Monday: antacid.
