I'm an American in Britain – Your Strangest Drinking Habits Revealed

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A Cultural Contrast: Alcohol in the UK and the US

It’s Sunday evening in my home town, New York City. My British wife would like a glass of wine with dinner. She asks me to pop out for a bottle. I tell her I can’t. The liquor shops are closed. She suggests the supermarket. I shake my head sadly.

In New York, grocery stores are forbidden to sell wine or spirits. At best, they can offer cooking wine or those grim, de-alcoholised wines that taste like fruit juice and the back floor of a taxi. “In the UK, you can get wine anywhere – the corner shop, the petrol station…” she insists. I interrupt, my puritan hackles raised. “You can buy wine while driving?” Having moved to Britain last year, and done the requisite research and had a few myself, I’ve concluded the UK drinking habits are no worse than those of America. Americans are simply more judgmental and furtive about it. We think you’re all drunk, and you think we’re all prudes.

Drinking Habits and Social Norms

You can buy alcohol anywhere. Studies show America and Britain drink similar amounts in total (though the UK does consume more on average). But we have quintessentially different approaches to alcohol. In the UK, drinking is woven into daily life. Pubs function as drinking venues and as social infrastructure. Babies, children, and toddlers are often present in pubs (illegal in New York), and they grow up seeing adults drink routinely, moderately, and publicly.

Yes, some of your better Prime Ministers started with brandy and soda at sunrise, had a pint of fizz at noon, and finished with brandy and port before passing out at 2am. The British Isles have over one hundred words for inebriated – including gazeboed, blootered, cabbaged, rat-arsed, and banjaxed. More if you include euphemisms: “had a few,” “a bit squiffy,” and the completely delusional “refreshed.”

I’ve discovered that here you can buy intoxicants absolutely anywhere – not only petrol stations, but motorway service stations. The other day I spotted a ‘Veteran’ gin for sale for £45 in the children’s section of the Imperial War Museum gift shop. In the children’s section. And no tonic!

Dry January and Social Drinking

Dry January – why? American drinking is furtive: parking lots, parties designed explicitly for intoxication, and sitting at bars alone. British drinking culture is social, ritualised, and unapologetically seasonal, surging at Christmas, collapsing into apologetic resolutions every January. It is messy, communal, and visible.

Speaking of Dry January – why? We don’t do that in America. If you ever needed a drink, Britain, it’s in January. From a friend: why don’t you just drink a little less during the year? Statistics say one in three Britons is attempting not to drink this month. The good news is that I won’t have to avoid two-thirds of you people.

At work, you go for a pint at lunch. Often the purpose of drinking in Britain is not the drinking itself but the social encounter. During the Second World War, the pamphlet Instructions for American Servicemen in Britain, explained that Britons go to the pub to “meet friends, not strangers.” This was considered sage advice to the chatty American, but anecdotally, that distinction still holds. Walk into an American bar and you will often find people drinking alone – despite Billy Joel’s firm advice that this is not a great look.

Drinking Age and Public Consumption

You tend to drink at work. I think work is soporific and miserable enough without a pint of beer in my afternoon tum. If you walk into any Manhattan bar at lunch, you might find it full, but remember that half the people in the pub are not American (probably British), a third realise that bar food is the only cheap(ish) lunch you can find in Manhattan, a sixth are alcoholics, and the rest are about to get a divorce.

You start young, and get drunk in public. The most famous idiocy of American alcohol law is our drinking age. In all 50 states, it is 21. An 18-year-old can vote, marry, sign contracts, serve in the military – and, in some states, be elected to the legislature – but cannot be served a beer. The effect is not delayed drinking so much as displaced drinking: alcohol moves out of supervised public spaces and into basements, dorm rooms, cars, and fields.

In the UK, the young are expected to drink and even drink to excess. At one New Year’s party, a public-school-educated friend showed me his 40 typed pages of rules for their hockey club’s drinking games, one of which seems to be called a “boat race,” which didn’t seem to involve any boats, and more importantly, no water. My wife admits to regularly imbibing something called a Purple Nasty. I didn’t investigate.

Legal Restrictions and Driving

Perhaps the lesson here is not in how to drink but how much to drink safely, while supervised (or mocked) by your peers. By doing it in public, you’re learning that when you drink too much, you might end up gaffer taped to a shopping trolley with your eyebrows shaved – an important and enduring lesson.

When I was young, drinking was mostly done in private, with a few supervised exceptions. I grew up celebrating the Jewish holidays, so that meant four small cups of wine per year, more if friends were being bar mitzvahed. My father always let me have a single sip of beer from about the time I was 13. He always had a single beer with dinner.

In late high school, what would be considered sixth form, I discovered binge drinking. I learned that with three quick shots of anything, I would no longer stutter and giggle when talking to girls. Instead I’d slur my words and yell, and while it felt better than nervous giggling and stuttering, I doubt I was any more charming.

I grew up in the suburbs which meant I had to drive to get to alcohol and back if served at a friend’s, so it was either a sleepover, or that one time we pushed a car home half a mile away. “It seemed like a good idea at the time, officer.”

The Impact of Alcohol Laws

Americans don’t drink too much – we drive too much. Alcohol law in the US remains riddled with religious hangovers. Roughly half of the states retain some form of Sunday restriction or ‘Blue Law’: full-day bans, bans on spirits but not beer, or bans during church hours. Even famously liberal states such as New York and Massachusetts keep vestigial restrictions on the books.

One reason we take a more puritan approach to drinking is not because we drink too much, but because we drive too much. America is vast and car-dependent, so are further from one another and from bars. Some 30 per cent of automobile-related deaths are a result of drink driving, compared to less than half that in the UK.

But we certainly did drink a lot. Before prohibition (those 13 interminable years in the 20s and 30s) America really did have a drinking problem. In the nineteenth century, per-capita consumption peaked at roughly seven gallons (26.5 liters) of pure alcohol per adult per year, three times today’s level. The US chose to correct this with prohibition. When prohibition’s side effect of organised crime combined with the misery of the Great Depression, we ended prohibition and settled for over-regulation and social shame.

Health Outcomes and Cultural Perspectives

Here’s the surprising part: despite different approaches, health outcomes are almost identical. Rates of Alcohol Use Disorder in the US and UK sit in roughly the same range. Recent figures place both countries at roughly 10 to 12 deaths per 100,000 people per year. Decades of American restriction (higher drinking age, limited retail access, state monopolies, and moral signalling) buy the country perhaps one fewer alcohol-related death per 100,000 people than Britain.

Neither country has solved the problem of excess. Britain still binge drinks; America still binge drinks (often alone). America treats alcohol as a dangerous substance to be tightly rationed, Britain as a social fact to be managed. Personally, I prefer the country where my wife can have a glass of wine with dinner.