Last night my friend Joel won this promotional thing for Goose Island’s new beer and won “his weight in beer”. Goose Island only comes in bottles, and Joel weighs, oh, about 165 pounds. How much beer will he get?
It’s a pretty good approximation to say that the human body is roughly the same density as water - people sort of sink, sort of float, don’t they? - on average the extra density of the bones is pretty much made up for by the body fat.
So your friend weighs 165 pounds, so that should win him about 165 pints, in America.
A bartender friend of mine recently told me that an average keg weighs 120 pounds. Don’t know how that translates into bottles, though.
Congrats to your buddy!
Surely that would only be relevant if he’d won his volume in beer? The relative denisty only matters between water and beer, rather than Joel, since we are more likely to know what water weighs.
In metricity, 165 lbs = 74.84 kg, and 1 kg is 1 litre, so that’s ~75 litres, which is enough to get you nicely drunk every night for about 3 weeks.
Assuming that beer has about the same density as water (1 g/cm[sup]3[/sup]),
165 pounds is 74.842 kilograms (I think), and that many kilograms works out to 19.77 gallons, which works out to 2530.7 fluid ounces, which works out to about 211-12 oz. bottles.
I probably screwed up someplace, but maybe not.
How clearly defined is the prize?
Will he actually win his weight in beer, or will he win his weight in beer bottles filled with beer?
The winning of beer is not something to be taken lightly.
I see what you mean; whether he is of equal density to water is moot; he could be a tiny 165-pound iridium robot, or a huge, 165-pound, gas-filled balloon monster and he would still have won the same amount of beer.
I worked it out to a tad under 211 bottles but it gets better. Beer has a specific gravity of 1.02 - 1.12 so let’s split the difference and peg this mystery beer at 1.09. That would give you 229 bottles of beer on the wall. The problem is that a litre only equals a kilogram at a little under 4ºC (where it’s most dense) but those specific gravity values are based on water at 15ºC. I’m not sure how much this puts my revised figure out. Shouldn’t be far off though.
Make that 1.02 - 1.16.
I think you’re fine. I get 19.771693 US Gallons as well, which converts to 210.898 12 oz bottles.
I suspect that, in the interests of cheapness and ease of weighing, that the brewery will count the weight of the bottles and packaging in the “weight” of the beer.
If he wins the bottles filled with beer, then (if I recall my days throwing cases of beer around a brewer’s warehouse correctly), a case of 24 standard bottles filled with beer weighs approximately 34 pounds. So if he weighs 165 pounds, he should get about 4 cases and 20 bottles (that is, 116 bottles). Though if I was the brewer, I’d just say five cases, to allow for the approximation.
If it is just beer–that is, the weight is not supposed to include bottles or cases–then it would likely be over 200 bottles, as the others said.
Well that would make them cheap bastards then. The brewery will have an exact idea of the properties of their beer. A twelve year old with that information and a calculator could save them the expense of having somebody actually weighing cases and just dole them out with a few remainder bottles to fill out the weight.
My figures worked out to 211.25 twelve ounce bottles of beer. What I want to know is if your buddy is gonna finish that bottle that the factory rep drank 3/4 of.
Was it some sort of online deal? If so, what needs to happen is for you to find the largest person you can to claim the prize. You don’t want some 78 lb. gymnast, you want some 320 lb. sausage inspector.
Why don’t they have Story Problems like this in school today?
You’re not suggesting this a homework question are you? 
A pint weighs a pound. A bottle of beer is 3/4 of a pint. So 165 pound is 165 bottles is 220 bottles.
It’s too bad there’s not some sort of “preview post” button to catch mistakes before they go out there.
165 pounds = 165 pints = 220 bottles
Update: the brewer gave him 7 cases, or 168 bottles. They counted the weight of the bottles and rounded up–he actually weighed 6.5 cases. And Joel was heavier than 165, too (I wasn’t about to ask how much he weighed before, but it’s 195).