As you can see above, turkeys in New Hampshire get fed beer for flavor purposes. Nice. This should now surprise no one, because New Hampshire drinks more than basically anywhere else in the United States. For beer, it’s 40.8 gallons per person, per year. For hard alcohol, New Hampshire residents average about 1.22 shots per day. They didn’t win the “wine” category — that went to DC (goddamn Northeastern liberal elitism!) — but they did come in second there.
Here’s the beer map:
Here’s the hard liquor map:
If you’re looking for a reason why New Hampshire is so high up there, check this out:
Part of that might be the result of cross-border sales—there is no sales tax in New Hampshire, after all, and the state’s liquor commission believes as much as 50 percent of its alcohol sales are bought by residents of neighboring states. But the per capita estimates are meant to account, at least in part, for that quirk. Meaning that while the nearly 41 gallon number might be a tad inflated, it’s unlikely off by the five gallons of alcohol that separates New Hampshire from the second biggest alcohol guzzling state.
Final interesting thing from this article: the way that alcohol consumption patterns move in the United States are cyclical to the point that you can argue we tend to drink what our grandparents drank, not what our parents drank. Hmmm. Also, in the grand scheme of the world, the U.S. doesn’t consume that much alcohol — South Korea, for example, consumes about four times as much. Globally, we’re only No. 10.
