The Curious Case of Wisconsin: How One State Proudly Became the Nation’s Drunkest

I recently learned that the state of Wisconsin is widely known as the nation’s “drunkest.” I was intrigued, hyperfixation spiral ensued.

Aug 27, 2025

Some months ago, I was scrolling on Twitter - as I am wont to do - and stumbled across the following heatmap.

This really piqued my interest. The entire state of Wisconsin is bright red. It’s not even broadly regional - they’ve colored very crisply within state lines. Though the image is sourced from the likely less-than-reputable IntoxiStates.com, I figured this data was at least directionally meaningful.

Which begs the question: Why?

Now, maybe this is common knowledge and Midwesterners are laughing at my shock and naïveté. I mean, their baseball team is called the Brewers. But prior to this, my understanding of the Midwest had been extremely basic and limited to a few core points:

Cold
Boring
Weird pronunciation of vowels

If you disagree, don’t get mad at me. As I said, I don’t know much. Anyway, it follows from that third bullet that some kind of collective substance abuse problem would arise as a result of existential boredom. But why is it seemingly SO much worse in Wisconsin?

I started digging and was regaled with incredible anecdotes about Wisconsites^[1][2] and their booze-fueled antics. Some highlights:

“I was in Mazatlan Mexico in 2008 and they wouldn’t let you compete in a drinking contest if you were from Wisconsin. The legend of our stories are [sic] sung far and wide.”
“House party in AZ had a surcharge for WI residents lol.”
“[The police] pulled over this 20 year old guy for a DUI. The guy had been drinking at home and decided to ‘take a drive around town for fun’. It was his 3rd DUI in two years! Apparently man’s hobby was drunk driving!”
“Growing up in La Crosse, WI in the 90’s, we would have a bar at our school spring music concerts at my Catholic elementary school.”
“I was in Vegas with a friend years ago and after a few drinks we were cut off by the bartender. We started joking around about how "back home in Wisconsin we'd just be getting started" and were going to leave but the bartender stopped us and asked to check our ID's, we showed her our Wisconsin drivers licenses and she laughed and apologized and said we were free to continue drinking.”
“Their current ad campaign to lure in visitors is called ‘Drink Wisconsibly.’”

These stories are deliciously unhinged. But still, none of them really answered my burning question as to why this is so state-specific. So after extensive research (read: scrolling), I came away with a few key explanations for this phenomenon that satisfied me enough to move onto something else:

Cultural Incentives.

In 1935, two years after Prohibition ended, the powerful Tavern League of Wisconsin was born. The TLW is a trade association that, in its own words, “is dedicated to serving the needs of the retail beverage alcohol segment of the hospitality industry in the State of Wisconsin.” With more than 5,000 members, the League supports a significant percentage of WI’s alcoholic beverage retailers.

For context, some of the organization’s stances include:

Anti-alcohol PSAs unfairly vilify people exercising their civil right to kick back with a cold one. Former TLW executive director Peter Madland is quoted as saying, “It’s gotten to the point where people are afraid to have a couple of beers after work and drive home, for fear they’ll be labeled a criminal… At lunch, people are afraid [that] if they order a beer someone will think they have a drinking problem.” A lot to unpack here.
People should be allowed to smoke in bars. I don’t really care about this one, to be honest, but it’s probably for the best that anti-smoking policies exist. The League pushed back heavily on the state’s indoor smoking ban for a while - only capitulating in the late aughts - citing concerns about the economic impact on small businesses. I guess it’s too cold to smoke outside?
The drinking age should be 19. Wisconsin’s drinking age used to be 18-19, but in 1984, they got strongarmed by the federal government into bumping it up to 21 or risk losing federal highway funding. They resisted for a while, but eventually complied. Nevertheless, they persisted - in 2017, the former president of the TLW introduced a bill to reduce it back to 19. Props for perseverance, I suppose!

The resulting decades of lobbying, advertising, and incentivization have seemingly fostered a culture that has zero qualms with party rocking. Which leads me to my next point…

Destigmatization.

One of the prevailing counterpoints I saw in my research (read: scrolling) was essentially this:

“The lines around the state of Wisconsin are much too neat for there to not be some methodological fuckery afoot. All of the studies are based on self-reported data. Maybe people in Wisconsin are just not ashamed to admit how much they drink, which is skewing the comparison.”

With all of the cultural factors above, it follows that Wisconsites may just not care to hide how much they drink. If you look at data points that aren’t self-reported, like alcohol consumption per capita (based on beverage sales data), things get a little muddier: Wisconsin is ranked 7th in the nation, behind New Hampshire, Delaware, DC, Nevada, Montana, and North Dakota. While that is a solid ranking, I don’t think they are banning New Hampshirites from drinking contests across North America.

Perhaps the good people of Wisconsin have reached a level of radical self-acceptance that even the Buddha himself could not envision. Honestly, goals.

Ancestry.

A theory I saw repeatedly is that the rampant alcoholism across Wisconsin is largely explainable by the state’s Germanic roots. In 2023, 40ish percent of the state’s residents claimed Germanic heritage. (I won’t dig into why so many Germans decided to move to WI, but here’s an article if you’re curious.)

The logic is uncomplicated: Germans brewed a lot of beer → Germans drank a lot of beer → Beer-drinking became an intergenerational trait.

I found this explanation the least compelling. Germans settled across the Midwest, not just in Wisconsin. Maybe this theory works alongside the other two, but certainly not on its own. Julia Sherman, coordinator for the Wisconsin Alcohol Policy Project, agrees with me, citing that “availability, affordability, attractiveness, and acceptability” are the main reasons for the prevalence of alcohol consumption across the state.

Sherman also posits that race is a more probable explanation than heritage, noting that the country’s white population has a higher rate of alcohol consumption than any other racial group, and Wisconsin’s white population is much higher than the national average. Alexa, play “White Boy Wasted” by Waka Flocka!

In conclusion.

There’s probably a lot more to unpack here. If you have any more insights into this curious phenomenon, I’d love to hear from you. If you disagree with anything, I’d love to hear from you too. If you want to do some field research in Milwaukee, DM me and I’ll book flights.

For now, I’ll leave you with this Lewis Black skit on drinking in WI.

Until next time - drink Wisconsibly.

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