Down the Iowa Liquor Rabbit Hole

While on BigQuery recently, I happened to stumble upon a public dataset for Iowa Liquor Sales and decided to take a quick look with some SQL.

Since the dataset has access to total sales measured by liters and the date of each sale, I was curious to see where each month in a given year would rank in terms of sales. December is an obvious pick for first place, but I thought it’d be interesting to see how every other month stacks up.

After deciding to focus on 2022 in particular and working on my query for a bit, I eventually settled on this:

SELECT 
  EXTRACT(MONTH FROM date) AS Month,
  SUM(volume_sold_liters) AS total_volume_sold_liters
FROM
  `bigquery-public-data.iowa_liquor_sales.sales`
WHERE EXTRACT(YEAR FROM date) = 2022
GROUP BY EXTRACT(MONTH FROM date)

Which gave me the following results, visualized in Tableau:

So right off the bat, we can see that my assumption was incorrect — December came in second place, and the month with the highest total liters of liquor sold was actually August!

I was instantly curious about why this was the case, so I Googled “liquor events in iowa in august”. This led me to an event called Iowa Wine and Cider Festival, but I soon found a webpage that says 2023 will be the first annual, so that couldn’t explain August of last year.

Next I tried searching for “liquor events in iowa every august”, and this time I found Travel Iowa’s list of cultural festivals that take place in Iowa.

There’s a few listed events that happen during August, but one that stuck out to me is the Iowa Irish Fest. Specifically described as a festival that “celebrates the Irish culture in Iowa with Celtic bands, Irish dancers, [and] Irish food and beer,” I think this could be one potential reason why liquor sales were so high during that month. (Even though the above link describes the festival as July/August, apparently, the 2022 event did take place from August 5–7 last year.)

Also, I probably should’ve realized this sooner given that I studied political science, but I was reminded through my searching that the Iowa State Fair happens in August as well! Plus, I found a news article that specifically details a ton of different alcoholic drinks you could’ve had if you were there.

Anyways, that was an incredibly random rabbit hole to go down, but ultimately I’m just happy to get the chance to use some more SQL and do a little investigating. Thanks for reading!