How Texas
drinks.

The nominal chart is a triumph — a cratered 2020 recovering into a skyline that blew past every prior peak. Strip out CPI and the curve gets more honest. Strip out Texas's population boom too, and what's left is the consumer-habit signal: per person, in today's dollars, Texans drink about 23% more than they did nineteen years ago. A real trend, not a rocket. Most of the headline growth was more people and more expensive dollars.

Four cities carry the state. Houston's — venues add up to more than Dallas, Austin and Fort Worth combined. The rest of the top 25 is a tour of specific things — Grapevine (Gaylord Texan), Corpus Christi (harbor tourism), New Braunfels (summer floats), College Station (football Saturdays).

Eighty venues move more booze than almost anything else in Texas: an NFL stadium, three ballparks, a convention hotel in Grapevine that functions as a small city, and then a long run of steakhouses, hotels, and — a few places you don't expect. Scroll through. We'll point at the weirder ones.

Wine is 12 % of Texas receipts — a share that hasn't budged in nineteen years. But its distribution is lopsided. A handful of steakhouses and destination restaurants do most of the state's wine volume, with Pappas Bros pulling two thirds of its entire bar take from the cellar.

Comparing 2019's monthly average to last year's, filtered to venues still doing at least $1M annually, separates the legit growth stories from pandemic casualties. Entertainment districts with new developments (Scoot Inn's East Austin, Hotel Drover in Fort Worth's Stockyards, Toyota Music Factory in Irving) dominate the gainers. The decline list is dominated by suburban stadium concessionaires and bars that never fully recovered.

In aggregate, the mix is the flattest line in the whole dataset. Liquor has held 60 %, wine 12 %, beer 27 % for two decades — through a pandemic, two inflation episodes, and a generational turnover of consumers. The variation is at the venue level, not the state level.