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Who needs BASSET in Illinois, the 120-day rule (60 in Chicago), the three-year card that cannot be renewed, and how to keep a whole roster certified.

Gallup says 54% of US adults drink, a record low. IWSR says Gen Z drinking is rising and Boomers are the real drag. A data-led look at what is replacing alcohol, what is not, and what the forecasts say through 2035.

Class 12 or Class 13? The Washington MAST permit difference explained: who can mix, pour, and supervise, plus the 60-day rule and how permits really expire.

Beer led the lift. On-premise beer sales climbed 14% in US host cities and 4% nationally, according to the Beer Institute. The concentration was extreme. Fans drank roughly 290,000 stadium beers across the six matches in Philadelphia alone, per FIFA organizers.

This guide breaks down what functional beverages are, why they are selling, what is changing in 2026, and how to get your team ready to move them with confidence.

Ask ten people about Gen Z and alcohol and you will hear the same headline: the kids quit drinking. The truth is more interesting, and a lot more useful if you sell beverages for a living. Americans are drinking at the lowest rate Gallup has recorded in 90 years, and the steepest pullback sits with adults under 35. But the generation the headlines call sober is anything but. Gen Z still drinks. It just drinks less often, more deliberately, and on its own terms, and that singl

Vodka is the best-selling spirit in America, and it is also the one your staff are most likely to sell on autopilot. Someone walks up, asks for "a bottle of vodka," you point at the shelf, they grab the brand they saw in a commercial, and the sale is done. No conversation, no upsell, no reason for them to come back to you instead of the grocery store down the street.

Walk into almost any liquor store, grocery beverage aisle, or back bar in America right now and the agave section has roughly doubled. Tequila climbed from a shot-and-salt afterthought to the second most valuable spirits category in the United States, behind only vodka. Mezcal, raicilla, sotol, and bacanora are landing on the shelf right next to it.

If you work in beverage alcohol long enough, the same question keeps coming up. A new hire asks what they should study. A distributor rep wants to level up. A retail manager wants a credential on the wall. A brand owner wants their team trained. And every time, the same alphabet soup gets thrown around. WSET. Cicerone. CMS. CSS. AFNA. Sommelier. Master this. Certified that.

There is a bottle on your back bar, or your retail shelf, or your restaurant's beverage list, that almost no one in your building knows how to talk about. It outsells most spirits categories in Japan, has a brewing process more complex than any beer on earth, reaches natural alcohol levels higher than any other brewed beverage on the planet, and arrives in your warehouse labeled in a language most of your staff doesn't read.