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by rightbyte 1064 days ago
Really? Have you tried it? I don't think it is possible for an adult. When I was in China vising a friend we tried to get abit drunk on local beer that was like 3.6% at most and it was like drinking soda. The locals seemed to drink spirits together with low alcoholic beer for some reason so there was no strong beer in stores, except some place that had Heiniken.

I have this pet theory that alcohol is not linear. Like, 5% beer get you way more drunk than the same amount of alcohol in 4.4% beer.
2 comments
kijin 1064 days ago
It's the percentage of alcohol in your system (Blood Alcohol Content) that makes you drunk, not the raw amount.

If you're drinking 30-50 units of water for every unit of alcohol, all that alcohol is going to be very diluted and have little effect on your BAC. There's probably a threshold beyond which you'll just piss it all out before the your BAC ever reaches a meaningful number.

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The_Colonel 1063 days ago
That honestly doesn't sound right. Drinking more water won't dilute your blood / BAC. You're mostly limited how fast you can drink that much liquid.
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kijin 1063 days ago
You are limited by how much liquid your digestive system can absorb in any given hour. I've heard that it's somewhere around 1 liter per hour. Any excess liquid is going to slosh around in your intestines instead of entering your bloodstream.

Meanwhile, your liver can remove about 10g/12ml of alcohol per hour. In order for you to reach a meaningful BAC, you will need to absorb significantly more than that.

For example, drinking 1 liter of 1% alcohol solution per hour will not result in any significant BAC, because you can remove alcohol from your bloodstream faster than alcohol enters your bloodstream. You've got a well-optimized queue there.

5 liters of 1% alcohol is the same as above, just repeated 5 times. Your queue is still working fine.

1 liter of 5% alcohol, on the other hand, will dump 50ml of alcohol into your bloodstream within an hour. Now you have a backlog, and this backlog is what increases your BAC.

So dilution does matter, even if the absolute amount of alcohol is the same. You're basically diluting alcohol consumption over time.

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The_Colonel 1063 days ago
I regularly drink 4% beer, and it's not difficult to get quite a bit tipsy on it, you just need to drink more. I regularly see men in pubs who drink 5 liters of such beer in an evening and that does get them drunk.
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rightbyte 1063 days ago
Sure I agree, but it feels like it is more than 5/4 times more for the same drunkness from 4 and 5% beer.
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