Is beer niche and performative?

Why cracking open a beer might not be as common as you think. A collaboration with Tracksuit.

This is a paid post in partnership with Tracksuit, the brand tracking platform that knows what people are really drinking (and why). For their latest Brand Mapping Survey, Tracksuit asked over 3,000 Australians about their relationship with beer to find out who’s drinking what, and how each brand stacks up in the national psyche

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It may be surprising to those who have met me in the flesh but yes, I occasionally like to knock back a cold one. It’s not exactly on-brand, but I like the performance of it. There’s something reassuring about reaching for a beer. A fun cosplay to be one of the lads for a minute. It’s a role I was never cast for growing up but occasionally, I allow myself to audition for it.

It got me wondering. If beer for me is slightly performative, was it like that only for me? In 2025, who really is drinking beer? And more importantly, why?

A few days ago, I was on the Instagram doom scroll when I saw a story from an art director I know. One of the jet-setting, well moisturised kind. His feet were kicked up on the coffee table with a Heineken cracked open and Geordie shore on the TV.

It wasn’t ironic or some sort of niche performance, it was just a guy and his beer. I guess you really can’t assume what people are into these days….

Beer as a Cultural Equalizer

In Australia, beer has long functioned as a social lubricant. Knock off beers, balcony beers, airport beers, even shower beers. Each are a universal social shorthand for camaraderie and togetherness.

Things have, however, begun to change. Drinking culture in Australia as in many parts of the world, has begun to decline. In 2001, 70% of Australians Aged 14-17 reported drinking in the past 12 months but as of 2023, that number dropped to just 3 in 10.

And even when young people do drink, they aren’t drinking beer. In a survey by Tracksuit of over 3000 Australians, young Aussies (particularly 18-34s) weren’t identified as the key drivers of any specific beer brands.

Where their parents associated beer with mateship, many now associate it with something more complicated: gender codes (In NSW for example. 50% of women reportedly don’t drink beer), masculine clichés, and branding that feels out of step with their lives. This doesn’t mean they don’t drink beer at all but it’s no longer a given.

Moreover, for some, beer is associated with the kind of loud, performative masculinity that feels both outdated and uninviting. In a cultural climate more attuned to gender identity and emotional nuance, the “hard-earned thirst” rhetoric of beer ads can come across as not just irrelevant but actively alienating. And so, beer gets sidelined as a symbol of a social order younger generations are less interested in performing.

It’s not just young people either. Amongst adults there’s likewise a growing rejection of alcohol. These days, more and more people are embracing ‘sober curiosity’ replacing Sunday sessions with Sunday saunas.

Beer as Identity or What Your Beer Says About You

Older generations (think older 55s) - those ‘rusted on’ with loyalty still drink beer without thinking. For them, the emotional logic hasn’t changed since their youth. Beer is part of the routine. Getting home and pulling out a beer from the fridge is basically as unconscious as tying your shoelaces. They love their favourite beer brand just like they love their favourite sports team.

Yet in a time when younger people are less and less likely to be drinking, what they drink is no longer an automatic impulse but a deliberate choice. Why beer? Why that beer? What does it say about me?

Thus, we arrive at the multiplicity of the current beer landscape that no longer only caters to the classic archetype of the sports-loving All Australian hero, but an entire diverse cast of characters.

• Heaps Normal, for the wellness curious and abstaining;

• Better Beer, for people who blokecore cosplay;

• Asahi if you’re an internationalist who likes an izakaya;

• Byron, if you’re from Byron (or you want to be).

Beer has become more of a positional good rather than a neutral category. We curate the type of beer we drink just like we curate anything else that signals our personality: bookshelves, playlists, wardrobe. To drink beer used to come with its own set of assumptions (and to some extent it still does), but what’s different is now that there’s room to flex within the category. The modern beer drinker isn’t one archetype but a composite of a few.

You might drink a lager because you like the taste. You might choose a non-alc beer because you’re sober curious or you’re a dewy dude who’s concerned that alcohol ages you (it’s true).

What Comes Next?

Beer is a $855B global industry and for now it’s not going anywhere. Yet, that doesn’t mean it’s immune to changing attitudes. If the beer drinker market is narrowing, then how we target the beer drinker, also must change.

When everything is form of signalling, beer brands, like all brands must clarify their stance. Are you ironic or earnest? Are you a reference, established mainstay or a challenger? Are you for the bros, or are you for someone else? Knowing yourself and your audience becomes ever more important because only then can you speak with any conviction. Failing to know yourself results in some tragic consequences. Just look at Bud Light and Dylan Mulvaney. If beer does continue to decline as a fixture of mass culture, the strongest brands will not necessarily be those that currently have the largest platform or reach but the sharpest understand of who they are. In a time of ultra personalised algorithmic content, specificity is the name of the game.

If you’re a regional brewery with loyal drinkers, don’t abandon that. Locality might be your greatest asset. And if your audience is mostly rusted-on regulars, ask yourself: what new identity might help the next generation feel like they belong, too? The beer that wins isn’t necessarily the one with the flashiest campaign. It’s the one that makes someone feel seen…or at least feel like someone they wouldn’t mind being seen as. VB may be seen as a working-class drink but it’s also reaching a new audience of faux working-class cosplayers.

The Last Universal Ritual

The words “Let’s grab a beer” has sparked many a great idea (or disaster depending on which way you look at it). But that levity, that ease: you, me, here now, is a feeling that beer drinking culture begets but is increasingly harder to come by.

Beer has not disappeared, but it is being absorbed into the same niche logic as everything else. It’s yet another thing that's become high context and carved up into a world of moods and performativity. Reading used to be something that everyone did by default and now it’s this thing that people feel like they need to flex. Perhaps beer is next?

I keep thinking about my friend’s Heineken. It was a very “just like me fr” feeling to see that bottle on the table. Again, it was equalizing. But in a few years, will it be another weird status signal?

I won’t miss the blokier aspects of beer culture, the casual misogyny, the flattening sameness, but I’ll miss the ease of it. The feeling that you could reach for a beer and, pretend to be part of something: one of the lads. Still, maybe there’s something freeing in all this. If beer is no longer a shortcut to fitting in, if even that becomes niche and coded then maybe I can stop trying to be one of the lads and I can just be myself.