Last weekend, as the sun appeared and freedom from the grip of the pandemic came within grasp, young people congregated around the streets of city centres, drinking takeaway pints from shuttered pubs and cans of beer.

The scenes of hundreds of young drinkers gathering around South William Street in Dublin provoked moral outrage on social media, especially after Chief Medical Officer Tony Holohan tweeted his “shock” at what seemed like a “major open-air party”.

It’s not just drinkers in their late teens and 20s who are in party mode. As the once-quiet Guinness brewery at St James’s Gate last week began delivering enough kegs for 5m pints of stout to pubs and restaurants ahead of the tomorrow’s reopening of outdoor hospitality, consumers of all ages are poised for an almighty session this summer.

Some commentators say the summer could usher in our own version of the Roaring 20s that the US enjoyed after the end of World War I and the (misnamed) Spanish Flu.

But just like in the Roaring 20s, when US alcohol consumption fell during Prohibition, sales of booze in Ireland have been falling. At the end of last month, Revenue figures showed that sales plunged by almost 20pc in the first quarter, slumping at a faster rate than the 6.6pc drop experienced in 2020.

Beer sales were the hardest hit during the first three months of 2021, declining by 34.5pc, while cider sales dropped 15.9pc. Typically, around 60pc of beer and 45pc of cider is consumed in pubs, restaurants, and hotels – known as the on-trade. Despite supermarkets and off-licences (or the off-trade) remaining open, spirits sales fell by 8.2pc and wine sales were down by 3.4pc.

Most of the declines can be attributed to the closure of hospitality, according to Patricia Callan, director of Drinks Ireland, which represents Ireland’s drinks manufacturers and suppliers. However, the absence of the on-trade doesn’t explain all of the declines, she believes.

“We have seen a steady long-term downward trend in alcohol consumption, which is 30pc off 2001 levels,” she says. “The decline globally was 6pc in 2020 and we were above that average decline. That means there has been a shift in drinking habits.

“For instance, 18- to-25-year-olds, or Gen Z, are typically all about having a healthy lifestyle – going to the gym, enjoying drinks with friends, but not drinking just to get drunk. Those trends were already well embedded before Covid.”

Indeed, industry experts say the drinking habits heightened by the pandemic – from imbibing cocktails at home and ordering drinks deliveries online, to choosing quality over quantity, or even swearing off alcohol altogether – may linger well after the pandemic fades.

These habits have evolved from the first lockdown, when surveys suggested drinkers downed more booze to cope with an apocalyptic news cycle. In April 2020, 22pc of drinkers surveyed by the Central Statistics Office said they had increased their alcohol consumption, and 17.2pc said their consumption had fallen. 

While beer sales dropped 17.3pc in 2020 and cider sales slumped 11.4pc, wine sales bucked the downward trend last year, rising 12pc.

“The wine industry has been booming, because 80pc of wine would traditionally be drunk in the home. During the pandemic, people were drinking it with their friends at online parties and in gardens – when they were allowed to,” Callan says.

The boom in at-home consumption of wine encouraged Conor Duggan, Neil O’Reilly and Conor Mulligan last year to set up Boxofwine.ie – an online wine subscription service – after their careers in the hospitality sector were pounded by the pandemic.

“We knew wine subscription in Ireland was underdeveloped, compared to other markets like the US and Australia,” says Duggan, managing director of Boxofwine.ie, which delivers wine tailored to a subscriber’s individual taste.

“People wanted wines delivered safely to their homes in these tough times. But as pubs and restaurants reopen, I think people are going to continue to buy online.

“Even though people will be eager to socialise, they are essentially creatures of habit – and if they have been buying wine online for the last 15 months, they are more likely to continue that.”

Since launching in early August, Boxofwine.ie has clocked up 750 subscribers. The entrepreneurs are gearing up for an investment round in the next three months to raise as much as €250,000 from investors so they can set up a distribution centre in the UK, where its business has also taken off. 

When pubs closed in March 2020, switching to online sales proved to be a saviour for Rascal Brewing, the maker of Wunderbar IPA and Yankee White IPA. The company, which has a brewery, off-licence and pizza restaurant in the Dublin suburb of Inchicore, increased production by 10pc last year.

Joe Donnelly, Rascal’s marketing manager, says: “We had 60-plus taps across Dublin city and county and in Galway, Cork, Limerick and Kildare – and suddenly in March 2020 they were all gone. The only way to save the company was to go absolutely hell-for-leather on becoming an online retailer.

“Our monthly sales reports in the second half of 2020 shows we were up 5pc to 15pc at times. Given the context, it was reassuring that in spite of everything, we were able to sell our beer and get new routes to market. Our biggest success story was with UK craft beer subscription service Beer 52, which now orders thousands of cans at a time from us.”

After a phased easing of Covid-19 restrictions began last month, Rascal noticed a decline in online sales because “people were more mobile, and could go to a different town and spend money at non-essential retail outlets like sports stores.”

Donnelly is confident that Rascal’s “whole swathe of new customers will continue to buy online, whether it be a new special edition beer or a keg for a barbecue. Now they know that with a couple of clicks they can get it delivered in two days’ time – and they don’t have to go anywhere.”

Despite the long-mooted death of the Irish pub, Donnelly doesn’t expect the rise of at-home drinking to erase consumers’ thirst for communing at their local.

“Some people will be slightly apprehensive about going to the pub until the whole country is vaccinated,” he says. “But I don’t think our pub-going habits will suddenly stop. There will probably be an initial spike in pub-going because people will want to celebrate.”

While craft beer aficionados prize quality over quantity, the entire beer category is facing a declining audience, Donnelly says.

“We are in 11th place for beer production in Europe and in 16th place for beer consumption, despite the perception of the Irish as heavy drinkers,” he says. “Our per-capita beer consumption is 77 litres, making us ninth in Europe. Czechia is the highest, at 142 litres. Millennials and Gen-Zers drink less and are more health-conscious than Gen-Xers like me.”

These trends were amplified by the 15-month closure of non-food pubs, which helped reduce the market share of Ireland’s favourite drink to 38.9pc in 2020 from 44.6pc in 2019, according to Drinks Ireland.

In addition, some beer brands crashed and burned because of falling sales in the off-trade.

At the end of April, Diageo stopped selling Hop House 13, a brand aimed at cashing in on demand for craft beer, in British pubs, supermarkets and off-licences, after sales in that market dropped by 8.7pc in the year to the end of September. 

Even before the pandemic, a growing number of manufacturers were offering more no-alcohol and low-alcohol alternatives, in part to appeal to Generation Z.

In 2018, Guinness launched a 0.5pc abv (alcohol by volume) lager called Pure Brew and its parent company Diageo acquired the non-alcoholic spirit maker Seedlip the following year. At the end of October, Diageo launched an entirely booze-free version of Guinness, called Guinness 0.0, to the off-trade in Ireland and Great Britain (though they recalled it a couple of days later, after microbiological contamination made it unsafe to consume). 

The Belgian brewer AB InBev, the Belgian owner of brands such as Budweiser, introduced a low-alcohol alternative to Stella Artois last year and pledged that low and no-alcohol products would make up 20pc of its drinks portfolio by 2025.

The volume of sales of low and no-alcohol drinks is set to grow 10pc a year in the US and 6.6pc in the UK between 2020 and 2024, according to drinks analytics group IWSR.

In Ireland, 2018 saw the launch of Silk Tree, a non-alcoholic botanical spirit that mimics the taste of gin. A couple of months later, Vaughan Yates and beverage consultant Oisín Davis opened The Virgin Mary – Ireland’s first entirely alcohol-free bar, on Capel Street.

The business has been importing non-alcoholic beers, alcohol-free spirits and de-alcoholised wines, selling online to customers since Covid restrictions compelled the bar to close.

Davis, a hospitality and beverages veteran, is the brains behind drinks festivals such as the Irish Gin and Tonic Fest. During the pandemic, his consultancy Great Irish Beverages linked up with drinks brands to host online Zoom tutorials for cocktail-making.

He discovered that the “macro trend of people learning how to drink better at home has been accelerated by the pandemic”.

“For years, people would say ‘I must learn how to make cocktails and learn the difference between a Riesling and a Bordeaux’, and the pandemic gave people the opportunity to do that because they couldn’t go to bars.

“In addition, companies couldn’t bring staff out at Christmas, so they pivoted to activities like a cocktail demo or a whiskey demo.

“The brands that did those demos reaped the benefits, because a customer would learn the best bourbon for an Old Fashioned cocktail – and next time they’re at the supermarket they’ll buy a bottle of American bourbon.”

Before the pandemic, Davis would occasionally man the bar at The Virgin Mary to learn more about customers’ drinking habits, patterns that he believes will outlast the pandemic. 

“Most people who come into us aren’t non-drinkers,” he says. “They just want to socialise without getting drunk, or are abstaining for a while.

“One time I worked the bar, there were three guys who all looked like typical Irish lads – well-trimmed beards, tattoos, tight jeans. They were chatting about what festivals they were going to go to that summer and how drunk they were going to get. And all the while the three of them were sitting over a non-alcoholic beer.

“Younger people are definitely drink less – and when they do drink, they don’t drink to the same level of excess that older generations used to. They are more health-conscious, more conscious of their own personal brand – because everything they do these days is documented on social media, and they don’t want to pop up on people’s feeds looking drunk or out of control.

“Then there are other substances they are using that are a lot more available than before – like weed [cannabis] – because they’ve travelled to places where it’s legal, like Colorado and Canada, where it’s having a negative impact on alcohol sales.

“My younger cousins, when they were in college pre-pandemic, wouldn’t drop everything if there was a two-for-one drinks promotion in a bar the way I would have when I was at Trinity. Back then, if there was any occasion where free or cheap drink was available, I would be on it.”