How Important is the Percentage of Alcohol in a Beer?
By: Joe Duncan
Tags: Health, Science, Culture, Lifestyle

How Important is the Percentage of Alcohol in a Beer?

A Story About Alcohol and Your Body

Did you know that the small little percentages of alcohol-by-volume you see on the bottle can amount to colossal differences in drunkenness during your night out on the town? I went through most of my life thinking I knew everything there was to know about alcohol and the body.

I drank heavily for years and, as a stroke of sheer irony would have it, it wasn’t until I quit drinking myself some years ago that I was able to analyze things with a wider lens and discover there were a lot of interesting facts about alcohol and the human body that I was completely ignorant of; things that would’ve come in handy when I was drinking.

Are you ready for a few of the fun, novel tidbits of information about alcohol and your body that might help you if you’re drinking? Or maybe they will help you to educate your friends on some of the misunderstandings we have about alcohol.

Have you ever wondered things like…

Can I get drunk on NA beer? Does alcohol content really matter? If so, how much does alcohol content matter?

Here’s the science behind these questions…

It’s Virtually Impossible to Get Drunk on NA Beer

Let’s start with NA beer and the fact that it’s virtually impossible to get drunk on non-alcoholic beer. Most non-alcoholic beers are 0.5% alcohol-by-volume, whereas most regular beers are around 4% ABV (light beers) to 5% ABV (non-light beers).

You probably just did some math in your head and figured out that an NA beer that’s 0.5% is 1/10th the strength of a regular beer that’s 5%. But looks can be deceiving…

I’ve seen a lot of people assume that you could just drink ten NA beers in an hour and reach the same state as you can with one full-flavored 5% beer. But that’s not exactly true.

This is because the body processes alcohol over time rather than all in one go. That means that in order to get drunk, you have to keep stuffing your face with more and more alcohol as time flows across and into the future, so as you keep doing so, those little differences in alcohol content add up, something that’s going to be handy to note as we go on.

If it takes me an hour to drink ten NA beers, by the time the hour is up, I’m back at zero. It’s a lot easier to drink five full-flavored 5% beers than it is to drink a whopping fifty NA beers at 0.5%. On top of this practical limitation, the math in terms of alcohol percentage is very different on the label of the bottle than it will be in your body.

Small Percentage, Big Difference

When most people are at the store, scanning the aisles of beer, trying to decide which is more important on that particular night, their choices being the decadent enjoyment of a full-flavored beer, like Budweiser, or trimming down that waistline by keeping their calories low with a light beer, like Bud Light, most people tend to view this question as rather inconsequential in terms of alcohol content.

Oh, how we couldn’t be more wrong.

Most people don’t naturally seem to intuit the idea that the Budweiser is just about twice as strong as the Bud Light. In fact, most full-flavored beers are twice as strong as their light counterparts, at least if you drink the recommended amount…but nobody ever thinks about it that way…

Wait, what?

Yes, you read that right.

Generally, a regular beer that’s 5% ABV is going to be twice as strong as a light beer that’s a 4% ABV beer if drunken like they’re supposed to be drunk, around one beer per hour.

Full-Flavored Beer is Twice as Strong as Light Beer

The percentages you see on the bottles can be misleading because percentages scale so that the more you drink, the more of an effect the percentages — and the differences between those percentages — have on your body.

If you just had a milliliter of 4% beer and a milliliter of 5% beer, of course, the differences wouldn’t be much at all. But let’s say you took one milliliter as your starting point and moved upward doubling that, you’re also doubling the difference in alcohol content.

And nobody drinks a milliliter of beer, the point is usually to have at least one full beer. There’s a magnification effect when you scale up from milliliters to whole 12 ounce bottles, or full pints if you’re in the UK.

Let’s Talk About Units, Baby

To break down why this is, let’s start off with the fact that alcohol is measured by units. A unit of alcohol is 10ml of pure alcohol, 8 grams. In each bottle, there are a certain number of “units” of alcohol and those units vary.

A 4% ABV beer has 1.4 units of alcohol in it, 14 ml of pure alcohol. By contrast, a 5% beer has 1.8 units of alcohol in it or 18 ml of pure alcohol. The difference here is still minor until we factor in, again, that the body processes alcohol over time.

The body can process 1 unit of alcohol per hour.

This means that if you have a 4% light beer, your body will process the 1 unit within the hour and the 0.4 units leftover will produce that fuzzy buzz feeling that most of us love so much.

By contrast, when you have the 5% full-flavored beer that’s 1.8 units, your body can process the 1 unit and the 0.8 units will be leftover — twice the fuzzy buzz feeling that most of us enjoy.

Crazy, right?

A Caveat on Drunkenness

Now, these numbers change the further away from the 1 unit per hour range we get. If you stay under the 1 unit per hour range, you’ll never get a buzz because the body can handle 1 unit and anything less than that with ease, processing it quickly before you get a chance to be buzzed. It takes more than 10ml of pure alcohol to feel an effect.

But the reason we can get really drunk is that we drink multiple beers per hour. As we sip multiple beers over 1 unit of alcohol, the body can only process the one unit, and the rest that’s leftover begins to accumulate in the body and cause noticeable drunkenness, bad decisions, STIs, and sometimes jail time.

So, the farther we get away from the one-beer-per-hour sweet spot, the less the difference will be, but it’ll still be very present and you’ll probably be quite drunk by that point.

Putting it to the Test With Science

In Germany, someone did a study with volunteers who were asked to abstain from all alcohol for five days to reset their tolerance to alcohol. The participants then drank 1.5 liters of NA beer that was 0.5% alcohol and immediately measured their BAC. The maximum BAC recorded was 0.0056%, which is far less than the legal limit of “one drink” which is 0.08. It’s actually also very, very difficult to get drunk on any beer under 3% ABV.

This means that in order to get drunk on NA beer, per their findings, you’d have to drink about 28 NA beers per hour to get the true effect (because the body can handle smaller amounts of alcohol faster than larger amounts, per the caveat on drunkenness). From the study:

The maximum blood ethanol concentration was 0.0056‰. The results of the study suggest that even after consumption of unrealistically high amounts of non-alcoholic beer negative forensic implications are not to be expected.

To Wrap Things Up

It’s basically impossible to get drunk on non-alcoholic beer. Like, full stop, it would require drinking an inhuman amount in an extremely rapid amount of time, and virtually no one’s body could accommodate that much liquid, the amount needed to get drunk on NA beers alone.

Generally speaking, full-flavored beers are about double the strength of their light counterparts, especially within the range of the first several beers up to a six-pack. So, if you’re trying to not get too drunk and still have a good time, go for a light beer or anything with around a 4% ABV, rather than a 5% ABV.

Alcohol content on the bottle does not reflect the alcohol content in your bloodstream after drinking. ABV and BAC are not the same things.

Be safe. There’s no shame in drinking a lesser alcohol beer or, as I do, drinking NA beer and skipping any buzz entirely. Beer is delicious. It’s a wonderful beverage to be enjoyed and celebrated. Hangovers, not so much.