Americans enjoy drinking beer most among alcoholic beverages: poll

Beer continues to edge out wine and liquor as the preferred alcoholic drink for adult Americans, according to the latest Gallup poll.

Forty-three percent of U.S. adult drinkers say they drink beer most often, the highest percentage recorded since 2002, when 44 percent said the same.

Meanwhile, 32 percent of adult Americans say they prefer wine and 20 percent say they prefer liquor.

Beer has been the top choice for adult Americans who drink alcoholic beverages in the past three years, Gallup said.

Generally, 65 percent of adult Americans say they drink alcoholic beverages, while a quarter of them occasionally drink too much, found the poll.

"Drinking remains a popular pastime for most Americans. For the nearly two in three Americans who imbibe, beer is consistently the preferred beverage of choice," Gallup said in a report.

Americans' drink of choice differs by gender, as it has since the 1990s, Gallup found.

Half of female American drinkers prefer wine, based on combined data from 2010 to 2016, while beer and liquor tie as their next-favored beverage, at 23 percent.

Meanwhile, 54 percent of male drinkers name beer as their preferred drink, followed by liquor, 22 percent, and wine, 18 percent, according to Gallup.

It found that while one in four adult Americans drink too much sometimes, men (26 percent) do so more often than women (16 percent). This gender difference is largely the same from the previous decade -- from 2001 to 2009.