> My experience of Germany was also certainly not “wine for dinner” type of behavior

Do you really suggest they drink hard liquor with dinner itself?

I grew up in northern Italy and spent years in Vienna for study, and did also a fair amount of travel around in Europe, what you seem to suggest just does not rings true for me.

For dinner and lunch it's normally one or a combination of:

* water, with or without CO2

* juice from self-made or store bought syrups (think from local berries or things like elder)

* soft drinks

* beer

* wine

Beer and wine are really not common on workday-lunch (at least if you don't work construction, or have a business dinner), but fairly normal on weekends or holidays, at least in my experience.

And only after dinner, and not always, a single Grappa/Schnaps/Shot is consumed, and that normally only if either people are over, or one dines at a restaurant (especially if it's a more folksy place).

If I go out with my SO to dine it's almost always a combination of water and wine if it's in a restaurant, and soda or beer if it's more street-food like, but never ever did we, or any other people we saw, drank harder liquor to their meal...

> binge drink to party and forget about their troubles

Party, yes. Forget their troubles? Not in the context I’ve seen it happen in.

Drinking was always a strictly enjoyable activity in itself, not something you did to forget your troubles.

As for the US it depends on the social group. Definitely lower socioeconomic classes have quite different approaches and in some places a beer with lunch and then more beer in the evening to cope with hard labour is not unusual. And countries differ quite a bit, e.g. UK's binge drinking culture is very unusual in the rest of Europe. The Scandinavians and anything close to russia are known for hard liquor. Etc etc

Hard liquor consumption is dropping everywhere in Europe and wine and beer are going up, especially in Eastern Europe, famous for hard liquor binging.

Only Northern Europe with its dreary weather is the outlier, somewhat.

My point being that raw alcohol consumption is going down across Europe.

Beer consumption in Germany is falling year after year consistently. Wine is growing, especially during Covid-19 time.

source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/575106/beer-consumption-...