I was discussing about that with a friend of mine who has never been in Finland, and had to explain him the basics: yes, Finns tend to have more, say, heavy-duty drinking habits, some people (especially the young) tend to literally drink to get drunk (so beers with high alcoholic content represent more value for money :-0 ), taxes to alcohol are therefore very high although they were dropped a couple of years ago and alcoholic beverages above a certain percentage are only available at the national monopoly.

The good news is that not everybody drinks like that (or maybe they do, but only in their student years 😉 ) and you find quite a few people who drink in a more Continental European kind of way (maybe some wine with food, but nothing of the harder stuff). Now that’s more like it.