“Grape or grain but never the twain.”
“Beer and champagne, bleed from your brain.”
“Beer before wine and you’ll feel fine, wine before beer and you’ll feel queer.”
"Bière sur vin est venin, vin sur bière est belle manière."
People sure enjoy their rhymes about drinking beer and wine, what order to drink them in and how that’s going affect you the next morning.
But, new research from the University of Cambridge (authored by true German researchers) suggests that that’s all a load of bullshit. It doesn’t matter what order you drink your beer and wine in, this study says, you’re going to feel hungover the next day if you drink too much of it.
And it’s about damn time some scientists put this theory to the test. People have been trusting old-wives tales, urban legends and drunk rumor for far too long. Now, we’ve got science on our side to justify our drinking decisions.
The study examined 90 different volunteers between 19 and 40-years-old. The subjects were split into three groups for the boozy experiment: one group drank two and a half pints of beer, followed by four large glasses of wine; the second group drank the same amounts in reversed order; the third, the control group, drank only either beer or wine. Then a week later the groups were switched, so that they could not only be compared to each other, but so that each individual acted as a control unto themselves.
It’s a fancy, high-brow, intellectual way of testing something many Americans experiment with on a weekly basis: getting drunk. Only this was for science!
And the results debunk every superstition ever uttered at a college party about drinking beer and wine together.
“Using white wine and lager beer, we didn't find any truth in the idea that drinking beer before wine gives you a milder hangover than the other way around,” says study author Jöran Köchling of Witten/Herdecke University in Germany. “The truth is that drinking too much of any alcoholic drink is likely to result in a hangover. The only reliable way of predicting how miserable you'll feel the next day is by how drunk you feel and whether you are sick.”
What it really comes down to is blood alcohol. Whether it came from beer, wine or both combined is irrelevant — drink a lot of it and you’ll feel tanked the next day. It’s not the liquor’s fault, nor is it the order you chose to drink in.
It’s your body's natural way of teaching you a lesson.
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