Background Researchers increasingly use theories of practice to understand health-related behaviours. However, few studies use quantitative methods to understand population-level change in practices over time. This paper characterises changes in the predominant drinking practices that comprised British drinking culture between 2009 and 2019.

Methods We use latent class analyses (Mplus v8.3.0.1) of annual cross-sections of data collected between 2009 and 2019 for an event-level one-week retrospective diary survey of adults resident in Great Britain. Participants are quota sampled from online managed-access panels based on age, sex, socioeconomic status and geographic region. The dataset comprises 1,042,942 drinking occasions reported by 213,470 individuals who consumed alcohol in the diary week. The measures describe characteristics of the drinking occasions including companions, location, motivation and purpose, temporalities, accompanying activities and alcohol consumed. We estimate separate models for off-trade only, on-trade only and mixed-trade occasions and for each year of data.

Results We identified fifteen occasion types (i.e. practices) in each year; four off-trade only, eight on-trade only and three mixed-trade. Some occasion types increased their share of occasions including Quiet drink at home alone (+3.9 percentage points [pp]) and Off-trade get together (+1.8pp) while others decreased their share, including Evening at home with partner (-5.4pp) and Family time at home (-1.1pp). We noted four key changes in the characteristics of occasion types: (i) spirits were increasingly likely, and wine decreasingly likely, to be the main beverage consumed in occasions; (ii) people moved away from consuming wine in short, weekday occasions with meals; (iii) the characteristics of some pub-drinking occasion types changed substantially but others were more resilient to change and (iv) Big nights out moved away from their traditional ‘pub crawl then nightclub’ form.

Conclusion British drinking culture between 2009 and 2019 was characterised by a mixture of stability and change. Home drinking, some forms of pub drinking and big nights out changed substantially while other forms of pub-drinking and meal-based drinking practices were more stable.