is drinking two 12% a.c the same as drinking three 8% a.c drinks?

Question

So like the title says, if I drink two 12% alcohol content drinks is it the same as if I drank three 8% drinks?

In: Other

Answer 1

If the drinks are the same size (volume)- yes. Sort of. Not really. It’s complicated. Alcohol is measured as a percentage of the whole volume. Let’s make up some fake numbers to make it easy.

You have a strong beer that is 10% alcohol. It is 10 ounces. Drinking that beer puts 1 ounce of alcohol in to your system. If you have a beer that is 5% alcohol and 10 ounces, and drink 2 of them, that’s 1 ounce of alcohol. Same same. Sort of.

The “sort of” comes in the fact that it takes longer to drink 2 drinks than it does to drink 1 drink. So your body is processing the alcohol over a longer period of time. The alcohol content in your blood (essentially, your level of drunkeness) will be lower because you consumed the alcohol more slowly.

Now you could chug the 2 beers very fast, which makes things closer. But that also puts more water in to your system (beer is mostly water, after all). And that would change the rate of absorption in to your blood as well.

There are lots of factors like the above examples that affect absorption. But that gets way too in the weeds. Very basically speaking, 1 normal beer = 1 normal shot = 1 normal glass of wine.