Beer or Wine? Find out which is least likely to give you a hangover

This is an important question for people hoping to avoid hangovers, at least, it was important enough that researchers have done a study about it. And we may now have an answer.

A glass of wine and a glass of beer

Researchers enrolled 90 adults between the ages of 19 and 40, randomly assigning them to one of three groups:

  • Group 1 drank beer until their breath alcohol level was at least .05%, then drank wine until it was at least .11%. That’s well over the limit of what can get you charged with drunk driving in the US.
  • Group 2 drank wine until their breath alcohol level was at least .05%, then drank beer until it was at least .11%
  • Group 3 was allowed to drink either only wine or only beer until their breath alcohol level was at least .11%

After a week or so, the experiment was repeated. This time, though, members of Groups 1 and 2 swapped, so that the order of the wine or beer they drank was reversed from the initial assignment. For Group 3, wine drinkers were provided only beer and vice versa.

Image result for wine

The groups were similar with respect to gender, body size, drinking habits, and frequency of hangovers. Hangover symptoms were assessed after each drinking session.

According to a commonly quoted saying, “beer before wine and you’ll feel fine.” There are a number of theories about why this should be true: one popular one is that if you start with wine and then drink beer, the carbonation in beer makes you more easily or quickly absorb alcohol from the wine. In theory, this leads to greater inebriation and a worse hangover.

Image result for wine before beer

The big reveal: beer before wine or wine before beer?
By conventional wisdom, beer-before-wine drinkers should have been in better shape than wine-before-beer drinkers. But that’s not what this new research found. There was no correlation between hangover symptoms and whether subjects drank only wine, only beer, or switched between them in either order. Perhaps the least surprising findings? The best predictors of a bad hangover were how drunk the subjects felt or whether they vomited after drinking.

And it makes sense: alcohol is absorbed rather well and rather quickly, regardless of its source.