On Tuesday morning in midtown Manhattan,

the best place to get a Bloody Mary was the third floor of the New York Yacht Club, where a few dozen rumpled booze journalists braved slush and hangovers to gather for an event with the least sex appeal of any put on by the beverage industry: an annual economic briefing held by the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, a trade group representing liquor companies.

Yes, cocktail writers prefer to simply absorb the country's drinking zeitgeist by skulking around fashionable bars and craft distilleries, but numbers can tell stories, too. This year's screamed about what happy, happy times these are for distillers, who are whistling Dixie as they continue to snatch market share from beer and wine. Whiskey makers, in particular, had a bang-up 2013. Witness:

1. Last year, whiskies accounted for 80% of the volume growth in U.S. spirits consumption, with most of that action in high-end and premium bottles.

2. American whiskey exports have topped the $1 billion mark.

3. Americans are drinking more of every category of whiskey ... even Canadian!

4. 129 new straight whiskies hit the shelves last year, 53 of them bourbons.

All in all, it seems to be a record-shattering time to be an American drinker; an era filled with stiff cocktails and unprecedented enthusiasm for the brown stuff. At least until you look a little further back. The best graph of the day was the only one that pointed down rather than up; a simple bar chart that illustrated whiskey consumption from 1970 to 2000. It looks like an Olympic ski jump.

In 2013, America drank about 53 million 9-liter cases of whisky per year, up a solid 20 percent from 2000. In 1970, when Patton was in theaters and Nixon was in the White House, America polished off 100 million cases. 100 million. That's half a case for every man, woman, and child living in America at the time. Today, the population is 50% larger and we still manage to drink only 50% of what they blew through back when troops were still in Vietnam and Elvis was actually alive; we, with our fussy little Manhattans and single pours over hand-chiseled globes of ice.

So if you want to know what a truly committed, no-nonsense, monogamous relationship with whiskey looks like, call your father.

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