I think we must have missed each other’s points a bit recently. I hear what you say above, but quite frankly I just don’t believe that Joe Sixpack would manage to “do the sums” to work out his alcohol consumption even if the government would own up to the fact that a “unit” is 10 mL of pure alcohol.

It’s easy for you and me to see that if you have a drink of N% A.B.V, then 1/N litres of the stuff contains one unit (assuming a unit is indeed 10 mL). That works out easy if you’re drinking 4% real ale: i.e 1/4 litres (250 mL) would be one unit. But it’s tougher if you’re drinking 11.5% wine. You’ll need a pocket calculator to turn 1/11.5 of a litre into (tap tap tap) 86.95 – call it 87 mL, and therefore to know that 87 mL of that sort of wine is “one unit”.

What you really need is labelling on the bottle (if you’re drinking it at home) or on a card at the back of the bar (if you’re in a pub) telling you how many mL equals one unit for each individual drink. Or better, do it the other way around, have a label or card that tells you how many units there are in each of the standard serving sizes for that beverage. Just like the labels in Tesco that tell you that milk is 65.3p per litre (even though it’s being sold in 568 mL/1 pint containers).

I think we’re getting distracted here. Fine – so a unit is 10 mL of alcohol. The UKMA’s got serious issues to bother about, honestly I don’t consider this to be more than a sideshow. Certainly not a pointer to metrication success in the UK. It was thought up by scientists in the last 50 years – of course it’s based on SI measures!

CO² emissions on cars are measured in g/km, *that’s* an SI-based metric just like drink units are. UKMA’s not making a fuss about that is it?

I fully share the concern about people drinking too much. The best time for people to reflect on what they tend to drink is when they are sober so they can be aware of their safe limits before they go down the pub. But we shouldn’t forget that’s not the only place alcohol is consumed.

The trouble with published guidance is that it doesn’t impress on people how much the alcohol content of (and hence the number of units) varies with different beers and wines for the same amount.

People are entilted to know the facts, why should they have to reverse engineer it?

The obfuscation is in the use of “units” instead of proper measurement surely?

Your average drinker down the pub on a Friday night is *not* going to manage to work out how many mL of pure Ethanol there are in a pint (or 500mL!) of beer. Or a 185ml glass of 10.5% wine.

Far better for us to have a “unit” or whatever you want to call it, with clear guidance that (say 1½) “units” is a man’s drink-drive limit. And then for point-of-sale to make sure you can tell how many “units” there are in a given serving of a given beverage.

Of course, if there is to be a “unit” then it must be documented somewhere what its definition is. I don’t understand why the UK government seems reluctant to do that, when everyone and their dog has reverse-engineered the fact that one unit = 10mL of pure Ethanol.

But come on – I think the use of a “unit” to help people know what they are drinking makes perfect sense. Just stop trying to obfuscate what a unit actually *is* eh?

It is controversial as one would expect but a pity they don’t come clean on what they really mean. What they are actually proposing is 40p/cL or 4p/mL.

So for example a 500 mL can of beer or lager with a strength of 4% ABV; in other words 4 mL alcohol per 100 mL of booze giving us 5 x 4 mL = 20 mL alcohol. That makes it 20 x 4p = 80p

As another example take a 700 mL bottle of wine at 12.5% ABV; 12.5 mL per 100 mL gives us 7 x 12.5 mL = 87.5 mL.
Then 87.5 x 4p = 350p (or £3.50) minimum.

So easy to work out when we are told what a unit is!

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……