How hard is hard liquor?



I am not a big drinker but I do like a good beer or whisky once in a while, so when I was considering a diet, I was a bit relieved that both my doctor and my dietitian did not try to ban alcohol all together.

Even though a healthy diet ideally doesn't contain alcohol at all, one or two consumptions over the weekend is considered ok.

However, recommendations are generally stated in 'units', roughly equivalent to a small glass of wine or a glass of beer. Now I don´t drink wine, but I do like both beer and whisky, so one of my friends suggested that a diet might benefit from staying with just beer, as 'hard liquor', or 'spirits', contains a lot more alcohol. Does this advice make sense?

It may sound like it does, but let's look at a small list of alcoholic beverages, both beers [see note 1] and hard liquor.

Brand Type ABV %
Heineken Pilsener lager 5.0%
Lagunitas IPA IPA 6.2%
Chouffe blond 8.0%
Rochefort 8 dubbel 9.2%
Westmalle tripel tripel 9.5%
St. Bernardus Abt 12 Quadrupel 10%

Brand Type ABV %
Dalwhinnie 15 years Single Malt whisky 43%
Auchentoshan Three Wood Single Malt whisky 43%
Bacardi Anejo Cuatro rum 40%
Smirnoff Vodka vodka 37.5%
Ketel 1 Jonge Jenever jenever 35%

First thing to note is that, unsurprisingly, hard liquor contains a lot more alcohol that beer does. In fact, (Scottish) whisky can only be legally called whisky if it contains at least 40% ABV.

Beers come in a lot of varieties and roughly range between 5 and 10% ABV, with lagers and IPAs generally on the lower end and Abbey style beers on the higher end. Going from dubbel to tripel to quadrupel it is interesting to see that the alcohol content does increase but not by the amount you would expect. Those labels refer to the 'mash bill', i.e. the amount of malted barley that is added to the brew, which greatly influences the taste but the final amount of alcohol is mainly limited by the exact type of yeast that is used.

So hard liquor contains a lot of alcohol but we don't consume it in the same amount as beer.

Let's take a typical example and compare a glass of Rochefort 8 (330ml, the volume of a typical european beer bottle) with a dram (shotglass) of Dalwhinnie:

Drink Volume (ml) ABV(%) Alcohol amount (ml)
Rochefort 8 330 9.2 30.4
Dahlwhinnie 15 40 43.0 17.2
Heineken pilsener 330 5.0 16.5

So the amount of alcohol in a typical glass of whisky is actually less than that in a glass of beer, unless you compare it to a typical lager. Even if I am less stingy and pour a more generous 50 ml shot of whisky, the amount is still considerably less (21.5 ml) than a glass of nice beer.

Conclusion

Does it make sense to swap beer in favour of whisky? No, looking at the amount of alcohol, whisky is the better choice: It contains way less alcohol than the heavier beers and a comparable amount as a typical lager.

And if we are looking at it from a dietary point of view, whisky is also a better choice as it is basically just water and alcohol without any sugars to speak of, while strong beer contains quite a bit of carbohydrates and even some protein, adding up to about 145 kCal [Note 2] per bottle for lager and even 210 kCal or more for stronger beer. A 40ml glass of whisky in comparison stays just under 100 kCal.

Note 1: I use beer in the broadest sense here, so this includes both ale and beer, and both lagered and top fermented beer. And this certainly isn´t about taste, otherwise I would not have included the bitter swill that Heineken calls beer 😀

Note 2: Even though I tend to stick to metric/S.I. units, kCal is so ingrained in food circles even in Europe, that I use them here too. 1 Cal = 4.2 J and typical values for various types of beer are sourced from the Netherlands Nutrition Center (see link in next section).

When talking about acceptable risks of alcohol intake, the British NHS is considerably more lenient at 14 units per week than the Netherlands Nutrition Center which puts it at most 7 units per week.

What counts as a unit is defined on this page where you will find that a shot of whisky is considered to be 25 ml (very stingy 😀)

Product pages

All those product pages require age verification (no affiliate links)

Note that although food and drink producers are legally required to provide nutritional information on their product packaging, their product pages are mostly marketing slop without much hard data. Even the ABV is not always available. Retailers do often copy label information to their product pages so you might actually be better of looking there.

Also, the Dalwhinnie site was so bad to navigate I linked to the Wikipedia instead.

Packaging requirements

Dutch beer labelling requirement can be found here. [dutch]

Definitions

Some common whisky and beer related definitions:

Acknowledgements

Image at the top was created by Gemini Nano Banana inspired by an original picture from Pavel Danilyuk

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