Yes, heavy or regular drinking lowers testosterone, though an occasional drink will not wreck your levels. The dose and the pattern matter far more than whether you drink at all.
Alcohol works against testosterone in several ways at once:
Studies in heavy drinkers consistently show lower testosterone, and in some, higher oestrogen, which is part of the same picture as high oestrogen in men. The encouraging part is that moderate, occasional drinking has only a small, temporary effect in most men. A couple of drinks now and then is not the problem; the nightly habit, the binge, or years of heavy use are what move your baseline down. Beer carries a small extra wrinkle, since hops contain mild oestrogen-like plant compounds, though you would need to drink a great deal for that to matter next to the calories and the lost sleep.
Because so much of the damage runs through sleep, the nights you do drink are worth protecting most.
It helps to put numbers on "heavy". The damage scales with the dose, and the patterns that reliably suppress testosterone are daily drinking, regular binges, and the kind of sustained intake that sits well above the roughly 14 units a week UK guidance suggests as a ceiling. The good news is that the testes recover when the drinking eases, so cutting back genuinely reverses much of the effect over weeks.
What to do: treat alcohol like any other testosterone lever. Keep it occasional rather than daily, avoid binges, and guard your sleep on drinking nights. Many men who cut back from nightly drinking to a couple of times a week notice better sleep, mood and morning energy within a few weeks, often more than any supplement delivers. It sits naturally alongside the other basics in raising testosterone naturally.
Go deeper: see the full entries on alcohol and beer in the food library.
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