Spiros Malandrakis, industry manager for alcohol drinks at Euromonitor International, has spent more than two decades watching the beverage industry expand, and is now watching it contract. In this wide-ranging conversation, he discusses what he calls the "permacrisis" gripping global drinks, arguing that the cyclical downturn the industry keeps hoping to ride out may already be something far more structural.

Spiros also argues that alcohol's real problem is an identity crisis: it's a fashion category pretending to be a food category, and it's losing younger consumers partly because their parents made it uncool. He also reveals a concept he's been developing and hasn't yet published — "nihilistic indulgence" — the emerging countertrend to wellness culture, driven by a generation of young people in crisis.

Felicity Carter is an award-winning wine and drinks journalist, editor and content strategist. She led Meininger’s Wine Business International to become the world’s most must-read wine trade magazine, and was founding Executive Editor of The Drop/Pix, which the Wall Street Journal named one of the most trusted sources of wine information. A regular keynote speaker, she was named a 2024 Industry Leader by WineBusiness Monthly. Her Drinks Insider podcast won the 67 Pall Mall Global Wine Communicator Award for Audio.

Celebrity partnerships in alcohol have a mixed track record. When a star is genuinely invested — creatively involved, personally passionate, publicly committed — the results can be transformative. When the celebrity is simply under contract, doing a weekly Instagram post and little else, the partnership quietly dies. So when Carlsberg announced that Robert Pattinson would become the face of 1664 Blanc, the obvious question was: which kind of partnership is this?

In this episode, Felicity Carter puts that question directly to Seva Nikolaev, Global Vice President of Premium Brands at Carlsberg. His answer is surprisingly candid. Pattinson wasn't just hired and handed a script — he was in the room (well, via Teams) from the beginning, shaping the creative direction of the campaign and bringing in his own trusted director, Brady Corbett, to helm it. Whether that level of involvement translates into the kind of authentic, enduring brand relationship that actually moves product is the big question running through this conversation.

Along the way, Nikolaev also pulls back the curtain on why 1664 Blanc is one of beer's most unusual stories — a super-premium lager that draws up to 80% of its new customers away from wine, spirits, and other categories entirely — and where he sees premium beer heading as the wider category faces mounting pressure.

Kirk French teaches one of the most popular undergraduate courses in the United States. His so-called “Booze and Culture” course at Penn State, which covers the anthropology of alcohol, attracts 700 students a time. From him, they learn how fermented beverages reveal fundamental truths about human culture. From milking horses to create traditional Mongolian airag, to excavating beer cans at football tailgates, French uses alcohol as a lens to make anthropology accessible and engaging. His research spans Maya brewing traditions, Appalachian moonshine archaeology, and the social dynamics of college drinking, all while challenging students to understand that alcohol consumption patterns expose socioeconomic status, cultural values, and the universal human desire for social connection and altered consciousness.

In this wide-ranging conversation, French explores why alcohol and agriculture co-evolved, why Native North Americans never developed fermentation traditions, and whether the current push toward abstinence represents a permanent shift or temporary reaction to pandemic-era overconsumption. He argues that America's 21-year-old drinking age removes crucial guardrails that protect young drinkers in other countries, that prohibition movements always stem from fear of what intoxicated people might do when their inhibitions drop, and that cannabis and social media are now substituting for alcohol's traditional role in lowering social anxiety. His conclusion: alcohol is too deeply woven into human culture across millennia to ever disappear, though consumption patterns will continue their historical ebb and flow.

Meet your host:

Felicity Carter is an award-winning wine and drinks journalist, editor, speaker trainer and content strategist. She led Meininger’s Wine Business International to become the world’s most must-read wine trade magazine, and was founding Executive Editor of The Drop/Pix, which the Wall Street Journal named one of the most trusted sources of wine information. A regular keynote speaker at international events, she was named a 2024 Industry Leader by WineBusiness Monthly.

And Drinks Insider is an award-winning podcast! It has won the 67 Pall Mall Global Wine Communicator Award in Audio.