I've done the maths on that and it comes out at 39.4 litres of 40% spirits a year, 750ml a week, or 108ml a day. In the UK that is basically two double spirit drinks.
Four UK units a day is above the recommended 14 per week and I'm sure isn't great for your health long term but most people wouldn't notice they are drinking at that level.
I appreciate this is the average so many will be way above that, but interesting to extrapolate it out.
To get to this amount of alcohol for reference, a pretty standard bottle of spirits is 750 mL and 80 proof, or 40% alcohol by volume. so if you regularly bought a One liter bottle of liquor you would need to drink 35.75 bottles of Jameson a year, or larger, and pricier, 35.75 bottles of Smirnoff.
That is the average, and from public health studies I've read in the past alcohol consumption by average has a serious barbell effect altering the average.
Personally I have three drinks and think " I should slow down"
I make 102g of alcohol about 1 bottle of 14% abv wine (so, strong-ish, but not exceptionally so) per week, or about 3 cans of 10% stout. Unless my math's wrong (1ml ~= 1g [not quite since it's not pure water, but close enough], 750ml * 0.14 = 105ml ~= 105g)
That seems low for "the most hardcore" alcoholics. If we exclude the absolute extreme top 1%, I'd wager the 95th percentile of alcoholics begins at 2 fifths (1.5L) of 40% liquor per day. And I might even be underestimating here.
> It's easy to have a couple of beers or glasses of wine and have 3-4 drinks in the process.
Yes and even drinking that quantity of high ABV beer or large glasses of wine that you describe and you'd still have to do it every day of the week to hit 21 drinks a week.
It is, as suggested upthread, an incredible amount of alcohol to describe with “as little as”.
> Seems to me that it is okay to have a drink a day
What's one drink?
One 125 ml glass of wine at 8% ABV would be 1 UK unit.
One 175 ml glass of wine at 12% ABV would be 2 UK units, nearly double the alcohol. One of those a day and you're drinking at the UK safe limit levels of 14 units a week.
A bottle of beer (say 500ml) at 5% strength would be 2.5 units, so not as much as 4 bottles a day [1]. Also worth noting that alcohol you buy in shops in the UK has the number of units printed on the label, so it's fairly easy to keep track of.
I don't drink a lot of alcohol, but I make batches of kalja at home for daily consumption - probably 0.5% abv because I'm impatient and bad at it. (And I'm, uh, using bread yeast lol)
It probably averages out to the equivalent of a beer every week or two.
But there is little variation in one respect. The optimal amount of alcohol is somewhere around 5 and 7 g/d, which translates into about the following every day: half a can of beer, half a glass of wine, or half a “shot” of spirit.
I can't find the thread right now, but someone did a back of the napkin calculation that you'd need to have 200 gin tonics a day to reach any kind of a reasonable level.
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