I am lost in the desert and dying of dehydration. I come across a beer. Will the water in the beer help me more than the alcohol in the beer hurts me in this circumstance?
What about wine?
Vodka?
Everclear?
Yes, beer is mostly water and won’t dehydrate you.
Having only the memory of the best beer I ever had (an ice-cold one after finishing 18 holes of golf and being really thirsty) to guide me, I looked for reliable sources on the matter (excluding sites like geeIhaveahangover.com which predominate).
Here’s one suggesting that in a pinch, relatively low-alcohol drinks will at least keep you from dying of thirst.
Another challenges the idea that booze has a terrible effect on your fluid balance:
I’d think that guzzling Everclear would probably hasten one’s death from dehydration in the desert, but beer could be a lifesaver.
Well I think you might get into the territory where drinking enough Everclear to get you the water you need would give you alcohol poisoning. But from that second link:
Basically, when you spend a night drinking alcohol, you pee just one extra time compared to if you were spending the night drinking water .
So unless you are not getting that extra micturation worth of water in through your drinks, they might dehydrate you, but if they’re low enough in alcohol that you could just maintain a buzz until you are rescued, just keep drinking, bud!
Alcohol gets metabolized down to water and carbon dioxide, so it’s perfectly fine to stay hydrated with beer. With liquor it would probably be difficult to drink enough to stay hydrated without suffering from alcohol poisoning first.
I thought alcohol was a diuretic which made you expel more water than you get by drinking it.
From everything I’ve ever read that is just not true. Alcohol is a diuretic but water hydrates you, most commonly consumed alcoholic drinks are primarily water, and the hydrating effects of a solution that is 93-95% water (for beer) or 80-85% water (for wine) are going to be more significant than the minor diuretic effect of the alcohol in those drinks. Liquor might even still be more hydrating than is the diuretic effect of the alcohol, but actually getting “enough” hydration from liquor would be really hard because the high alcohol content means you’d suffer probably fatal alcohol poisoning if you tried to solely use liquor to hydrate.
I’ve seen some rough figures like “one unit of alcohol will cause you to lose upward of four units of water”, but even if that ratio is correct, a solution like beer which is frequently 95% or more water, would definitely be hydrating.
If you drink a lot of beer or wine you’ll get hungover and be sick, which is another problem.
If it’s resolved that beer is better than nothing, is beer better than water? Suppose you’re on an island with no food, but you can either have unlimited clean, fresh water, or unlimited clean, fresh beer. Which would keep you alive longer? Beer has calories, so presumably you’d starve less quickly. But would the alcohol kill you in some other way, drinking so much of it?
Yes, alcohol is a diuretic because it suppresses vasopressin (also known as anti-diuretic hormone (ADH)). Vasopressin signals your kidneys to hold onto water. But the effect isn’t huge. Here’s a study that suggests that drinking stronger alcoholic beverages results in a mild, temporary diuresis. Beer? Not so much. So, go ahead and drink the beer.
The same is true of coffee and caffeinated drinks. They might make you pee more, but the net effect is not dehydrating.
Drinking caffeine-containing beverages as part of a normal lifestyle doesn’t cause fluid loss in excess of the volume ingested. While caffeinated drinks may have a mild diuretic effect — meaning that they may cause the need to urinate — they don’t appear to increase the risk of dehydration.
Seawater is mostly water but you don’t want to drink it. It will kill you faster than not drinking it.
That’s due to the sodium content. Sodium ions can’t be metabolized any further, so they have to be excreted along with water. In the case of seawater, the amount of water required to adequately dilute it is greater than the amount originally present. Beer doesn’t have any significant amount of sodium or any other substance which has to be excreted as is, so that isn’t of concern. In fact, the opposite tends to be the case. Hard core alcoholics sometimes don’t get enough sodium in their diet due to drinking just beer or wine and ignoring their food intake, leading to low sodium levels.
I would drink the beer, especially if its cold and a IPA, however if you opened it and left the bottle/can in the hot sand for a bit some of the alcohol would evaporate.
Interesting question. Medieval monks brewed doppelbocks as “liquid bread” to get them through periods of fasting. A quick check shows Celebrator Doppelbock has roughly 1 cal/1 ml (actually about 80% of that) so if you don’t exert yourself on that desert island. It takes roughly 1 liter/day of water to keep you alive under those circumstances, so you’re good there.
This guy has given up everything but beer for lent for the last couple of years.
Your doctor may not approve.
Wouldn’t the water evaporate too?
ETA: I guess the alcohol would evaporate faster than the water. Maybe.
Alcohol does evaporate faster than water, but it’s not like all of the alcohol evaporates, then all of the water. You’ll end up with a weaker beer, but also less of it.
And I don’t think that the fact that sodium can’t be metabolized is relevant to seawater’s dehydrating effect, as the dehydration happens before anything would get a chance to be metabolize: Ordinarily, water in your intestines gets absorbed through the intestine walls into the bloodstream, but when the water concentration is low enough (because the concentration of something else, like salt, is high enough), water instead passes through the intestinal wall the other way, to dilute the seawater. And this effect should occur with any solute.
No. But your priest might. 
When I visited Death Valley National Park, I was surprised to learn that there were no water fountains inside the park boundaries (none, at least, that I could find), so I was forced to scrape by with the large case of beer I got from Costco before entering the park.
I found that it did hydrate me somewhat, but obviously not as effectively as water. It basically did the bare minimum to prevent me from dying of dehydration during my hikes. I went to the bathroom fewer times than I expected, and my urine was consistently darker in color. It’s a good thing I visited in the winter, because in the summer I probably would’ve died even with all that beer.
Even if the beer is diuretic, just save the resultant and give it a second pass though the system. (And as luck would have, you now have an empty bottle.)