Thanks to everyone who participated in the polls the last couple of weeks, we have a rough picture of this community in terms of frequency of whisky consumption. Even though I think the findings are plausible, they should be taken with a pinch of salt as the data collection was very rudimentary. Also, the analysis is not advanced enough to draw any detailed conclusions on things like the psychosociological factors influencing the habituality of alcohol consumption etc. So please don’t think anyone in a particular group is “better” or “worse” than another. Now with the garnish out of the way, we can get into the meat and potatoes. The first poll asking how many days you take off whisky per week on average was already interesting enough in and of itself. One way of looking at that data is that the community is split into two camps, one a minority and the other a significant majority. Roughly 70% of people will take three days or more off their favorite elixir per week. Over a quarter in total will even go five days plus without. The other 30% take less than three days off. Less than a 10th of people in total consume on a daily basis, though. That’s already very interesting, but we can round out the picture more when combined with the other polls. Here is the gist of it. On average, in a given randomized group of 10 people from the ultra-niche whisky enthusiast community, you will get a distribution that looks something like the following: 6/10 will abstain from whisky most of the time and be completely dry. 1.5/10 will rarely ever take a break. Maybe a day or two here or there with, as mentioned above, a small minority being daily drinkers. 1.5/10 are people who, while not necessarily often breaking from whisky consumption during any given week, take a dry week or month off at a time and then don’t mind frequently consuming throughout the week outside of those timeframes. 1/10 people abstain from whisky practically as much as the first group mentioned above, but they partake in other non-hard liquor. Most whisky enthusiasts only drink whisky a few days a week. Interestingly, the camp that abstains most also doesn’t drink any other spirits. If you took this poll to a broader audience, I’m sure you would get some people who alternate between things like Rum or Mezcal when they are not enjoying a whisky, but it was 0% in this poll. Maybe that’s not too surprising, as the poll was taken among a select few who signed up on a platform meant very specifically for whisky. Our two smallest minority groups by far were those that either drink whisky every day on the one end of the spectrum or, on the other, drink non-spirits perhaps even more frequently during the week than they do whisky. I am in the group that takes at least 3-4 days off (sometimes more) from whisky and doesn’t really drink anything else, which seems to be the bulk of this community. So what do you think of these findings? I hope you found them interesting, and thanks for participating!

Posted by Willem Kilian at 2023-06-10 07:08:08 UTC