ABV is a relative metric that only works for comparison purposes when your drinks are all the same volume. Even if they are the same, drink volumes and drink specs will vary from establishment to establishment, and your customers don’t only frequent yours. And, of course, drinks are frequently not the same volume. A Vodka Tonic, a Daiquiri, and an Old Fashioned can easily contain a similar amount of ethanol, yet have wildly different ABVs. ABV is too abstract. It leads to fuzzy decision-making like “I’ll just have a low ABV drink” before hitting the road.
An additional weakness of ABV is that it’s an extra set of calculations that contain an opportunity for error—because the person making the calculation has to really understand and correctly factor in dilution. Dilution is important for making great drinks, but it’s ultimately of marginal significance to how inebriated you get.
A score based on the standard drink is easier to calculate: you disregard all the ingredients that are non-alcoholic and any other dilution, total up the scaled alcoholic ingredients, and divide by the standard. This yields a simple score: 1.0 is one standard drink. 0.66 is 2/3 of a standard drink. Works nationwide (varies a bit internationally).
Using a standard drink score system on a drink menu is better because the customer can simply add them up and know how many drinks they’ve really had. The tally could even be added to the tab. (Scoring would be equally relevant to beer menus, these days, given all the high octane beer that’s around.)
Jeffrey Morgenthaler’s spreadsheet already does almost all the work. It just needs one additional cell that calculates the standard drink score. I’ve taken a stab at that here: https://mdoudoroff.s3.amazonaws.com/ABV-Calculator.xlsx
Great points on ABV and it’s calculation. At first glance it does sound like a good & easy way to gauge one’s consumption, but with factors like dilution & the other things you mentioned like how different drinks are made differently are well worth making note of, though likely seldom thought of.
The Chrysanthemum is a drink that contains only alcoholic ingredients: vermouth, Benedictine and absinthe. All too typically, Punch blithely characterizes the drink as “low proof” simply because it is not high proof. This is truthiness at work, and it’s one degree separated from the mistaken notion that the Chrysanthemum is a drink of negligible alcoholic content. The truth is that the Chrysanthemum is a drink of medium alcoholic strength and, indeed, of medium ABV (although the latter is, again, an indication of flavor concentration/dilution, not overall strength/toxicity).
Current industry language employs two binaries:
alcoholic vs. non-alcoholic
This is a legitimate binary, because a drink either contains alcohol or it does not, and that matters. This binary is self-evident.
alcoholic vs “low alcohol”/“low ABV”
This binary is bogus, because the quantity of alcohol in an alcoholic drink is continuously variable depending on formula and serving size. The subtext of both “low alcohol” and “low ABV” is that the alcohol in these drinks doesn’t matter, doesn’t count. This bogus binary is—quite literally—dangerous, because it obscures that these drinks almost always do contain significant alcohol and it sets people up to drink too much.
Again, my advocacy is that mixed drinks on all menus be annotated with the calculated decimal quantity of standard drinks that a particular rendition presents. This is an easy scalar—a simple number like 1.3 or 0.8—that anyone can relate to both to compare choices on the menu, and to tally up the number of drinks they’ve actually consumed in a session. Such a number is no more a typographic burden than the price.
I am certainly not opposed to additional annotations provided they are not designed to foster confusion. Total oz of alcohol would be educational. ABV would actually be useful because once you get a sense of it, the number further clarifies the experience of a drink more than keywords like “stirred” or “long” or what have you.
To you, what would be the standard drink? The 1.0?
And this would assume intoxicated people will still behave reasonably. Often, the higher the blood alcohol level goes, the more the numbers start to look like a challenge. Been there…
Yeah, I’m not a bartender/owner but am definitely sensitive to the concerns and issues of the industry and this scaling/numerical system presents a marketing problem I think. If even a “normal”/average drink is “1.6 standard drinks” or more, it’s likely to disincentivize people from ordering them. Distribution in use for this kind of rating system will naturally be quite uneven unless it is made a legal mandate, so any bar that chooses to list the “number of standard drinks equivalent” might well suffer in sales because of it. That means there is a likely disincentive to adopting it, at least the official US definitions anyway.
This is all speculation, social dynamics are weird and maybe there could even be the opposite effect or some other beneficial correlation (e.g. being one of the few bars listing drink equivalents becomes a differentiating factor and an attraction for enough people), but it seems likely to be a challenge for early (bar) adopters to me.
It feels perhaps misleading, but using a different baseline standard of “1.0”, one more calibrated to the average drink serve of today (1.5-2 oz alcohol), might work better. As long as it were not indicated in the same way as the official US standards are, I would think could avoid any legal issues of using a different scale. Probably some explanation/definition would need to be on the menu, likely found from an asterisk and written in tiny font on the last page.
Anyway I think it’s a problem worth trying to solve. Just wanted to add some thoughts on potential implementation challenges to the discussion.
I’d rather see a law requiring a standard drinks-based indication on drink menus (and RTDs, I suppose, not that I care about those) than ooga-booga scare labeling defacing every bottle of likker like the Surgeon General was proposing.
