Are Whiskey Songs Going Away?

It’s Ryan Gill’s job to pair artists, especially those in country music, with their own whiskey brands. Over the last few years, he’s succeeded in setting up Nashville names like Drake White, Michael Ray, and the Cadillac Three with signature lines, but increasingly he’s been encountering a unique problem: locating artists who actually drink.

“A lot of our work involves finding new artists to collaborate with. And I never would have guessed that the hardest part would be finding artists that still drink,” Gill, director of marketing and brand development for Three Chords Bourbon, Inc., says. “That’s become a huge hurdle in the last couple years.”

The trend is reflective of a nationwide change in alcohol consumption. A Gallup poll released late last summer showed that only a little more than half of adults — 54 percent — were drinking. That’s down four percent from 2024. The poll also suggested that members of Gen Z, those born between 1997 and 2012, were imbibing far less than the generations that preceded them, reinforcing a wealth of anecdotal evidence from bar and club owners that twentysomethings just aren’t enamored of drinking culture. And with whiskey supply in particular currently exceeding demand, some venerable distilleries are pausing production. Jim Beam announced it’d be halting distilling efforts for all of 2026, and George Dickel temporarily closed its Tullahoma, Tennessee, operation last fall.

In both songwriting rooms and business meetings around Nashville, some are wondering if the change in consumption behavior will trickle down into country music, where songs about booze are ubiquitous and big-name stars like Chris Stapleton, Dierks Bentley, Riley Green, Midland, George Strait, and Tanya Tucker all have their own branded spirits. Will artists be less inclined to stamp their likeness onto their own bottles? Will lyrics about sipping whiskey and shooting tequila be replaced by lines about mixing mocktails and popping gummies?

Stapleton, whose recording of “Tennessee Whiskey” recently became the first country song in history to be certified Double Diamond, is doubtful that the music will ever be fully divorced from drinking alcohol.

“Much like anything, cultural norms are cyclical,” Stapleton says. “Maybe drinking is not in fashion right now, and people are smoking more weed, or finding whatever the thing is… but I think those things always have peaks and valleys.”

During this month’s Super Bowl, Sazerac, the beverage company that owns Stapleton’s Traveller whiskey, aired a high-profile ad for the Kentucky bourbon, underscoring just how strongly it believes in the natural union of country and drinking. “It doesn’t seem like something that would ever go away in country music,” Stapleton says. “When I go play a show, if I didn’t play a song about whiskey, I think I might be in trouble.”

But Fred Minnick, a whiskey expert and author of the new book Bottom Shelf: How a Forgotten Brand of Bourbon Saved One Man’s Life, says there is trouble brewing for artists who may want to follow Stapleton’s lead and get into the spirits game. The decline in the number of people drinking and the whiskey stockpile — a result of overproduction during the pandemic — are just two of the factors that make introducing a new brand particularly challenging.

“It has closed the door for future brands. Even someone like Garth Brooks, I don’t think, could come out with a brand and carry it,” Minnick says. “There’s so much leg work that goes into building a brand. You can’t just come out with a whiskey, put it online, and ship it to all 50 states. Whiskey is a highly regulated industry that basically takes your fame, punches it in the face, and says, ‘We don’t care.’”

When the country trio Midland introduced their Insolito tequila brand in 2020, they emphasized high-quality product in brightly colored bottles. The band’s Cameron Duddy says they also had time on their side. “As long as you’re making good stuff, whether it’s tequila or music, you’ll cut through,” Duddy says. “But we did it early on, and I think we’ve got a nice foothold in the tequila world.”

However, he says he’d be hesitant to enter the fray today. “If someone’s reading this and they were thinking about starting a business in alcohol right now, you definitely have to look at those numbers, and go, ‘Why?’” Duddy says.

Like Minnick and Gill, Duddy is watching the downward trend in alcohol consumption closely. “It’s troubling for somebody who’s in the business of doing it,” he says. “It’s also a head-scratcher as somebody who’s just a consumer of alcohol. I think that as the younger generations live more or less online and inside, there’s less cause to go out and mingle at the bar.”

They’re not the only ones observing the pivot away from alcohol: The cannabis industry is also eyeing it closely. Forrest Dein, the co-founder and CMO of Willie’s Remedy, a THC tonic promoted by Willie Nelson, is registering seismic growth since launching the drink less than a year ago. To date, Willie’s Remedy has sold more than 400,000 bottles, becoming the top-selling THC beverage available online.

“We’ve been in the alcohol business for eight years,” says Dein, who first got his feet wet co-founding the beverage company JuneShine. “When we launched Willie’s, we weren’t sure how fast it would grow. But in a year, it’s five times the size of our alcohol business.”

That reinforces a 2022 poll by New Frontier Data that showed nearly 70 percent of respondents between 18 and 24 preferred marijuana to alcohol. Dein says he’s also heard from colleagues in the music festival industry who are seeing young concertgoers purchase THC seltzers on pace with those of alcohol-based seltzers, like the wildly popular White Claw. “That’s showing me that Gen Z is coming onto this trend,” he says. “But it’s also crossing generations. We’re talking to a lot of our customers, and people in their 30s and 40 are drinking [Willie’s Remedy] with their parents who are in their 70s and 80s.”

The increase in people sipping tonic, munching gummies, or rolling and smoking is having an effect on the songs being written in Nashville — but many of the songwriters we talked to for this story said that whiskey and beer lyrics are not on the decline.

“There are more weed songs for sure, but I still hear sober people writing about drinking all the time. I don’t think it’s going to disappear,” says Aaron Raitiere, who co-wrote hits like Lainey Wilson’s “4x4xU.”

Neil Mason, drummer for the Cadillac Three and a writer of hits for Jake Owen and Rascal Flatts, says tip-‘em-back songs won’t ever go away, even if he isn’t writing as many of them.

“Drinking songs have always been a big part of country music. In many ways, our band built its career on them,” Mason says. “I write about it less these days because I’ve been sober for four years, but if drinking belongs in the story we’re telling, the goal is always the same: Stay true to the song, not the trend. It’s a subject I know well, and I don’t shy away from it when it serves the truth of the lyric.”

While Stapleton admits he doesn’t go to writing sessions as much as he did when he was starting out, he says he’s never heard anyone throw water on whiskey. “I haven’t been in a room with somebody where they said, ‘You know, I just don’t think that we should write songs about whiskey anymore.’ That’s not my experience,” says Stapleton, who points to younger artists like Zach Top and Ella Langley — both members of Gen Z — and their recent success with drinking songs.

Top’s 2024 breakthrough album was titled Cold Beer & Country Music, while Langley just became the first female artist to simultaneously hit Number One on the Billboard Hot 100, Hot Country Songs, and Country Airplay charts with “Choosin’ Texas,” which includes a hooky line about Jack Daniel’s.

Raitiere writes often with Langley — he co-wrote her first Number One, the Riley Green duet “You Look Like You Love Me” — and says the topic will always be threaded throughout country music’s fabric.

“Truck and beer songs are here to stay,” he says. “I think a resurgence of bro country is on the horizon, actually.”

Minnick, meanwhile, is concerned over the drop in whiskey consumption but calls back to a historic analog, with one key difference. “What’s happening to the whiskey industry now is similar to what happened in the 1960s, when the younger generation started reaching for vodka instead of bourbon,” he says. “The difference now is that the younger generation is either not drinking or would rather pop a gummy and sit on the couch.”

As for young songwriters in country music, Midland’s Duddy says they should just write their truth — whether that’s weed or whiskey. “Country music talks about pretty common stuff: going to a bar, smoking a joint, fixing your car. That’s why it’s so accessible and honest,” he says. “I just hope they don’t start writing about Fortnite and Minecraft.”