But sales of gin up 23% ... in Dry January!

DESPITE the fall in problem drinking, sales of alcohol – and especially gin – surged last month as ‘Ginuary’ clashed with ‘Dry January’.

An estimated 4. million Britons gave up booze for the month, but total sales rose by 10 per cent year on year. Gin was up by 3 per cent, according to retail analysts Kantar Worldpanel.

Spokesman Fraser McKevitt said: ‘Alcohol performed well over the month, though this was helped by a strong New Year’s Eve.

‘All in all, 53 per cent of households bought alcohol in January.’

The biggest sales jump of all was by low-alcohol and no-alcohol beers, up by 79 per cent, as those feeling the effects from a sodden December embraved Dry January. The campaign began as a charity drive in 013, when just 5,000 people stopped drinking for a month and gave the money they saved to good causes.

Today, many of the millions who join in are motivated more by the health benefits, which can include significant weight loss.

A rival – and somewhat incompatible – campaign to celebrate Ginuary has been embraced by those unwilling to give up spirits after the festive season. Sales have seen such a major lift in recent years that gin has now been added to the official basket of goods used to calculate inflation alongside baked beans and bread. More than 75 gin distilleries now operate in the UK. The drink has undergone a remarkable transformation from the scourge of the 18th-century working classes to a style-statement drink. Once demonised as ‘Mother’s ruin’, it provoked governments to impose punishing taxes and severe restrictions on sales. Consumption then flatlined until the 1970s when gin and tonic became a popular middleclass tipple. Now more than half of all gin drinkers are under 35 and many prefer upmarket brands which add ‘botanicals’ such as coriander seeds, angelica roots, rhubarb and even seaweed.