Is there any truth to the saying, “Beer before liquor, you’ve never been sicker. Liquor before beer, you’re in the clear” ?
I used to hear this all the time in the dorms in college, but I have trouble believing that the order you take your drinks in will have any effect on how sick you’ll be at the end of the night. But on the other hand, there’s a lot I don’t know about alcohol, so I turn the question over to y’all!
I’ve found it to be true, but I have no idea why it would be so. Generally, mixing different types of alcohol is a bad idea if you drink large quantities. As an experienced drinker, I advise that vodka & soda is the drink that is least likely to leave you sick or hungover. The vodka has few additives, and the water rehydrates you without adding sugar.
I don’t know that the order is all that important. I think what is generally more important, though, is the “frame of mind” you’re in as you’re drinking the drinks. For one, it takes longer to drink a beer than most other drinks. So:
Liquor before beer - you get nice and toasty off the liquor, then you wind down with some beers. But by the time you get to the beer, you’re already half-drunk. So you don’t drink many beers, and the ones you do drink take a while to get down.
But beer before liquor - you get half drunk on the beer, but then switch to shots or something. Now, you can do a lot of shots in a hurry, and since you’re half drunk anyway, there’s nothing to stop you, so you do 4, 5, 6 shots in a row, before you start feeling the effects. Then the cumulative effect hits you.
This makes perfect sense to me, but I have a hard time explaining it, sorry. Basically it’s the percentage alcohol that makes the difference.
That does make some sense ski. There’s something about throwing shots on top of a belly full of beer that makes your stomach feel off. I’m thinking that the order of the drinks isn’t so important and the following is more accurate:
lots of liquor + a little beer = OK
lots of beer + liquor = not OK
I’m glad to hear you say that, ski because after a few drinks I can never seem to remember the proper order of the saying.
In all the colleges of the U.S. full of drunk scientists and engineers, one of them has to have done an informal study where the quantity of different alcohols[sup]1[/sup] or the total quantity of alcohol[sup]2[/sup] is the same but the order is changed and correlated that to sickness.
Or maybe the people like me who’d analyze that sort of thing are also the people like me who don’t drink.
[sup]1[/sup] Person one drinks five cans of beer then two shots, person B does two shots then five cans of beer.
[sup]2[/sup] Person A drinks 1000mL of beer at 5% then 25mL of 100%, person two drinks 50mL of 100% then 500mL of 5% beer.[sup]3[/sup]
[sup]3[/sup] Ignoring the stupid disappearing volume of alcohol in water 'cause it’d be too hard to work out on a napkin while under the influence of 75mL of ethanol.
A related column by Cecil: How can I avoid a holiday hangover?
Heres a good Onion article on a semi-related matter.
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World Eater–A couple years ago, I worked in a genetics lab at the University of Wisconsin (not only the hometown of the Onion, but a fine binge-drinking school), and that article was posted. Furthermore, I had the opportunity to see a bunch of grad students and post-docs attempt to do delicate work with expensive (and sometimes carcinogenic) reagents after getting sloshed on champagne to celebrate the first Ph.D. to graduate from our lab.
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In regards to the OP, I believe that ski has it right–you tend to maintain your pace regardless of what you’re drinking. Most people seem to down beer at a higher rate than stiff drinks, and that’s when they get in trouble. As you get drunk, you also tend to regard shot glasses as unecesarry when mixing drinks, which is always what gets me into trouble.