"What America needs now is a drink," President Franklin D. Roosevelt apparently said when Prohibition was repealed. Nowadays, America seems quite fine with tea or a low-sugar soda, leaving alcohol stocks in a tough spot.

Shares of Molson Coors, Modelo maker Constellation Brands, Sam Adams and Twisted Tea brewer Boston Beer, and Jack Daniel's owner Brown-Forman are all down over the past six months, with losses of 4% to 19%. Heck, they're down over the past five years.

Business is bad. With beer sales going the wrong way for over a decade, brewers are going through a particularly rough stretch. Beer production fell 5.6% in 2025, and was down another 5.4% in the second quarter of 2026, according to BNP Paribas analyst Kevin Grundy. U.S. spirits sales have been flat, but when you exclude ready-to-drink beverages like canned cocktails, spirits sales were down 4.1% in 2025 and 4.9% in the second quarter.

"People are drinking less," Grundy says bluntly. Alcohol is increasingly seen as unhealthy, and it's often being replaced by cannabis and nonalcoholic drinks. GLP-1 adoption isn't helping, either, as anyone who's tried to split a bottle of wine with a newly thin friend knows too well.

What makes this worse is that younger customers are most at risk of going sober. Only 32% of Gen Z consumers are drinking weekly, versus 45% of older cohorts, according to a UBS report published in April. "This lower propensity to drink from Gen Z means that as these younger generations age/replace older generations, this will ultimately represent a headwind to volumetric consumption," UBS says.

Grundy, too, says that the problems for the U.S. alcohol industry are structural, which is why he's bearish on Constellation Brands, Molson Coors, and Brown-Forman, even though alcohol stocks' valuations have fallen by about a third in the past five years. Brown-Forman, which reports earnings on Wednesday, is now trading at 16.5 times forward earnings per FactSet, Constellation is at 11 times, and Molson Coors is at 8.7 times, all noticeably below the 22.8 times multiple for the consumer staples sector.

Staying away from these stocks isn't exactly contrarian. While analysts are reasonably bullish on Constellation, the other alcohol names are shunned by Wall Street. Only 22% of the analysts who cover Molson Coors rate it Buy or Overweight, per FactSet, while just 11% are positive on Brown-Forman. Just one analyst out of 15 who cover Boston Beer rates it a Buy.

"Woes Known and Cyclical," is how this lone bullish analyst, Roth's Bill Kirk, summed up his read on Boston Beer in a July note. He explains that higher fuel prices have recently cut into consumer budgets for tipples.

That's a cyclical problem, but alcohol's structural problems may just be getting started. Peer pressure works in both directions, and if being the only sober person at the party isn't fun, then neither is being the only drinker.

Value investors might be tempted. But this is a time for abstention.