It's not 10 times stronger by volume. A shot of whisky contains about the same amount of alcohol as a pint of beer, so the body has to do roughly the same amount of work to process that. However you're correct in that what a pint of beer effectively is is a shot of whisky diluted by nearly a pint of water. Obvioulsy if you drank as many whiskys as someone else drank pints and nothing else, you'd end up feeling more dehydrated the next morning. However I found when I did drink I tended to drink shorts slower than I drank pints, so I ended up drinking fewer over the course of a night.

Jon

Is it's really good beer I've found, it tends to make you a bit toilet-happy in the morning anyway, I find this has a greater effect on my dehydration than the actual alcohol content, I don't feel as thirsty when i drink wine (grapes suit me more than wheat it seems).

Beer tends to give me the [LIFTED] too, and yes - diarrhoea is certainly dehydrating. I find sweet tea and a bacon sandwich to be the quickest cure, although it can take a while to recover fully.

Err, what? 40% ABV v 4% ABV is ten times stronger by volume by definition. An equal volume contains 10x more alcohol. I'm unclear what your point is, unless you're agreeing with me in a round about way?

+1 although these days I don't drink much at all, maybe 1 or 2 beers a month.

The only "hangovers" I've had come from eating curry...

25ml of 40% whisky = 10ml ethanol
568ml of 3.5% beer = 20ml ethanol

So do you think dehydration is the main component? I've been trying to figure out why sometimes you can have one pint and feel crap the next day and yet on another night have several and feel fine.

Sorry, terrible choice of phrase. I was suggesting that the amount of alcohol you take in is roughly the same, because while whisky is much more concentrated, you drink much less of it. And on that theme...


It's quite a while since I've seen a draft beer round these parts that's as low as 3.5%. Most standard 'table beers' tend to be between 4 and 4.5% and once you're into the premium lagers they tend to be 5% or even sometimes more. I remember reading a while back that the 'one pint = two units of alcohol' rule doesn't really apply any more since beer on average is considerably stronger than it used to be.

Jon

It may depend how well the beer is kept. Barrels of beer have sediment and other stuff in them and one of the things you're supposed to do is leave a barrel in place to settle for a period before you tap it. If your bar manager/landlord isn't doing that - maybe because he's going through the beer at too fast a rate or he's just lazy - you're going to get a pint of beer with more impurities in it and therefore (effectively) it's going to poison your system more and make you feel worse. This is more with your traditional real ale type stuff though, the big brand name beers that get produced by the mega-gallon in industrial processes shouldn't suffer from that so much.

Jon

I haven't had a drink for several months and yet just a few days ago felt like I had a hangover. I had put it down to dehydration due to physical work on a warm sunny day.

Yes the dehydration is why they suggest drinking water afterwards. Though sunny days make you sweat more making you more dehydrated. The two go together to make it easier to get a hangover.

You may have a point there.

The worst hangovers I've ever had have been when we used to have drinks in my parents local pub. I mean they were severe, no matter how much I drank. I later found out they never really cleaned the pipes properly under the then management. No bloody wonder.


Yup, I guess it must be the main component.

In conjunction with the slight swelling to the brain that alcohol causes the pressure build up would explain the cracking head frak you can get I guess.

Not his best TV series. I small some stock animations, a script and a chance to slot him into the gaps between the pop science bits. I was expecting more from him, really.

The animations kind of remind me of the BBC version of The HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Jon