Global vodka volumes fell 3% in 2025, according to drinks market analyst IWSR, leaving the spirit on the back foot internationally as Vodka Day arrives this Sunday, 4 October. In Britain, though, the picture is more stubborn, with a vodka still the single best-selling spirit brand of any kind poured in the country's pubs and bars.
IWSR, which tracks the drinks markets that make up roughly three quarters of global alcohol sales, named spirits the worst performing major category of 2025, with volumes down 4% and value down 9%, figures reported by The Spirits Business in April. Vodka held up slightly better than the spirits average on value, down 1%, but lost 3% of its volume. The one bright spot in IWSR's full-year review published in June was ready to drink, the only major category to grow, up 3% in volume, with premium ready to drink volumes rising by more than 15%.
The UK on-trade tells a slightly different story. CGA by NIQ's data for the twelve months to 4 October 2025, published by the Morning Advertiser, put Smirnoff Red at the top of every spirit brand sold in British pubs and bars, with more than 926,000 nine-litre cases and £1.18bn in sales. Its volume slipped 4.7% while its value rose 1.4%, a pattern repeated across much of the list, fewer drinks sold for more money per glass. The standout mover was Chase, the Herefordshire potato vodka, whose volumes almost quadrupled. Consumer sentiment points the same way, with YouGov's 2026 alcoholic drink rankings, published last month, finding 13.5% of UK adults would consider Smirnoff next time they buy, second only to Gordon's gin among spirits.
None of that is surprising once you look at how much of the British cocktail menu vodka quietly props up. Poland and Russia have argued for decades over who made it first, with Polish historians pointing to court records from Sandomierz in 1405 that use the word, and the spirit spent most of its history as something drunk neat and cold. Its reinvention as a mixer came from America, where the Moscow Mule was created in Los Angeles in the early 1940s as a way to shift an unfashionable spirit. London then built two of the most ordered drinks of the last forty years on it, the Espresso Martini, created by Dick Bradsell in the 1980s, and the Pornstar Martini, which Douglas Ankrah put on the menu at his Townhouse bar in Knightsbridge in 2002. Vodka Day itself is a younger idea, a marketing date that has been marked in the United States on 4 October since at least 2009.
The vodka cocktails are not all moving the same way. Drinks International's 2026 survey of the world's best bars placed the Espresso Martini fifth, while the Pornstar Martini fell fifteen places to twenty sixth, a slide covered on this blog last week. That survey reflects a small group of trend-led bars, and the drink remains a fixture on ordinary British menus, but it is a reminder that a spirit's resilience and any single cocktail's popularity are two different things.
David Baddeley, founder of Boozy, said: "Vodka's never really been the star of the show, it's the thing that lets the coffee or the passion fruit do the talking, and that's exactly why it keeps its place. What these numbers show is people aren't drinking more of it, they're choosing more carefully and paying for something they actually like. That's a healthier way to drink and it's the way we'd want people to enjoy ours."
Three of Boozy's canned cocktails are built on vodka. The Espresso Martini pairs vodka with coffee at 12% ABV, with the bar method on the Espresso Martini recipe page, and the Pornstar Martini pairs vodka with passion fruit and vanilla at 8.4% ABV, with its own Pornstar Martini recipe. The fruitier Purple Rain, at 8.4% ABV, is also vodka based, and its Purple Rain recipe shows how to make it from scratch. Anyone curious how a home-poured vodka cocktail compares in strength and units with a canned or bar serve can check it in the Cocktail ABV Calculator, which covers more than 100 recipes.
Boozy asks everyone to enjoy Vodka Day responsibly. Guidance on units and lower risk drinking is available at drinkaware.co.uk.
