Wild Bill

Are you aware of the “Guinness Surger”. It adds yet another layer to the confusion between draught “pints” and various non-draught ways of serving short measure “things that look like pints”

You might almost think that the brewers were actually interested in finding new ways of keeping legitimised short measure………….

Is is however the case that regardless of the science of alcohol usage, draught beer and cider in pubs is sold in pints. No government is likely to want to face the barrage of anti-EU ranting in the tabloid press to change that.

Unless of course it can be shown that there might be a genuine health reason for doing it, and I might have such a reason….

Consider this situation: you drink Guinness(*) down at your local. They don’t have Guinness on tap, so when you ask for a Guinness they take a 500ml bottle out of the fridge (or a 500ml can) and serve you with that. You’re used to it, and indeed plenty of the UK pub-going public are used to being served 500ml servings of beer if their pub doesn’t do their favourite on draught.

You go and stay with your brother (in a different town) for the weekend. You pop out for a beer on Saturday night after the footie. He gets the round. You ask for your favourite – a Guinness.

Unknown to you, your brother’s local *does* have Guinness on draught, so unknown to you (not being at the bar), you get a pint, not 500ml. That’s 12% more than you’re used to, but in the hubbub, would you notice?

6 pints later, you’re falling all over the place and wondering why. You’d think that the government would want to set up the rules so that people knew what they were drinking – the claim that they do – but here that’s not the case.

Suppose instead that you drink just one unexpected pint. You’ve still consumed 12% more than you planned. Are you over the drink-drive limit? You may know that you aren’t normally, but that’s at home when you’re drinking 500ml measures. You could lose your licence and more – and all due to the confusion that the government causes with their insistence on their “pints for draught beer and cider” rules.

Just a thought….

(*) or Grolsch, or……

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-13863196

If only they would say just that the safe limit for older people is 15 ml per day then that “small glass of wine” might be pinned down to something meaningful.

It could have been decided that a unit was equal to an ounce or something else in imperial.

The problem isn’t with the name, it is with the products that don’t come in rounded metric sizes. For example, one can calculate that a “pint” of beer contains 56.8 “units” of beer. Now if the alcohol content was 5 %, the difficulty in estimating the amount of alcohol becomes difficult so no one bothers to figure it out. A quick estimate would be that 10 % would yield 5.68 units of alcohol, so 5 % would be half of 5.68 or 2.84 units.

It would be simpler to calculate 5 % of 600 mL and get 3 % or 5 % of 500 mL and get 2.5 %.

So, if there is a difficulty, then the solution should be to change the legal amounts of dispensed alcohol to rounded metric sizes.

E.g. with beer marked as alcohol: 4 ml per 100 ml, it would be effortless for just about anyone to work out that a 500 ml glassful contains 20 ml (or 2 cl if you prefer).

I know this amounts to the same thing but it wouldn’t demand that the consumer understands percentages. Presumably the practice of labelling nutrion information as per 100 g is for the same reason.

‘A 500 mL container with 500 mL beer, with alcohol content of 15 mL/3 % is a bit clearer than 500 mL with 3 cL.’

However, I am quite concerned about the introduction of the metric prefix, centi, into a context where it would be used everyday.

I have studied the progress of metrication attempts all around the world, and in many different industries, where I have observed that the use of the metric system prefix, centi, in the unit centimetre very dramatically delays the success of the metrication process. See http://www.metricationmatters.com/docs/centimetresORmillimetres.pdf

I have not specifically studied the places where centilitre is used, but on the basis of the enormous delays with centimetre I would not recommend its use without considerable study – and even then I would require massive evidence of its speed of adoption and of its non-transference to other industries – centilitres of oil, paint, or vinegar, are examples – before I could recommend its use.

Pat Naughtin
Geelong, Australia