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Plan on indulging in a cocktail or two over the holiday weekend? Depending on how it is made, it may contain much more alcohol than you think.
The National Institutes of Health is offering a solution. It has an online calculator to measure how much alcohol really is in that margarita you may be sipping on.
A “standard drink” is the amount of alcohol in a 12-ounce beer, 5 ounces of wine or an ounce and a half of distilled spirits and it’s a useful way to track consumption, but the multiple ingredients make for a harder count.
Recipes matter, too.
The calculator, for example, says a pina colada with 3 ounces of rum is the equivalent of two glasses of wine.
Cut some of the rum, though, and it’s closer to a standard drink.
A margarita with an ounce and a half of tequila and an ounce of orange liqueur is the equivalent of 1.7 standard drinks.
Agencies/Canadajournal
How is this news? Why would anyone need a special calculator to determine how much alcohol is in their drink? It’s not advanced math, you can do it yourself with the built-in calculator on your phone, or any calculator.
A standard bottle of beer is 341ml, 5% alcohol. To find out how much alcohol is in that beer, just multiply 341 by 0.05, and you get 17ml of alcohol.
Let’s say you made a drink using 100ml of 40% vodka, 50ml of 20% rum, and 120ml of 30% gin:
100 * 0.4 = 40ml
50 * 0.2 = 10ml
120 * 0.3 = 36ml
40+10+36 = 86ml of alcohol, or about 5 times as much booze as that bottle of beer. It’s that simple.