Why is alcohol measured in percentages?

Comments

• BeefPiano@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  ABV works for all types of packages. It could be helpful to know that a can of beer contains 18.6ml of alcohol, sure, but what about a bottle of whiskey or vodka? Is it better to know that it’s 40% alcohol or 300ml? Should a bar publish that a keg has 4.2 liters of alcohol in it?

  With ABV you can compare alcohol across volumes.

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• krellor@kbin.social ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I haven't seen anyone really answer the why of it, which is that the industry developed using a floating glass tool called a hydrometer which measures the specific gravity, or density, of liquids.

  When you boil the wort to prepare for fermentation, you end up with a sugary liquid that is denser than water or alcohol. Water has a specific gravity of one, and the specific gravity of the wort is increased by everything you dissolved into it. You would float a glass hydrometer in it and lets say you get a reading of 1.055.

  After fermentation the yeast has converted much of the sugar to alcohol and decreased the specific gravity. You measure a second time, and multiply the difference by a constant factor to get ABV. let's say after fermentation you got a reading of 1.015.

  1.055 - 1.015 = 0.04
  0.04 * 131 = 5.24% ABV

  We label with ABV because that was how it was calculated, and remained the same regardless of the quantity served.

  There is a similar process for distilling as well. Before these methods people didn't know the exact amounts, which led to fun things like navy and admiral strength.

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  • Blyfh@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    That still doesn’t give us a reason why customers have this special calculated value. You could just multiply the volume by this percentage to get the absolute value. Why is the percentage preferred over the volume? I see no reason for either side.

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    • krellor@kbin.social ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Like I said, because the percent doesn't change with the volume served. If you are an 1800s brewer you can calculate the ABV from samples, and subsequently sell kegs of various sizes, bottles, which in turn can be served in various amounts and the percent doesn't change. And the industry never changed, nor the laws written. So it's the way it is because that is how they used to do it and how laws were written and there hadn't been a motivation for people to change that.

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    • pelya@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      You have to print a separate label for each bottle size then. Much easier to print something like ‘10% strength’ and slap the same label on all of your barrels and bottles regardless of their volume.

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• fishos@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  X% of the cans volume tells you the exact amount. You can know with very simple math. The reason why is because historically, alcohol drinks are taxed based on the concentration, or percentage, of alcohol. Beer would be taxed at a lower rate than say whisky. It was all based on the percentage, or “proof”, of the beverage, not the actually amount. That was a small and large jug of whisky would be taxed at the same rate.

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• Breve@pawb.social ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  There are medications that measure the active ingredient as a percentage too, like topical creams. I think it’s done to make the relative strength easier to compare when the volume is varied. Labelling a keg of beer or a barrel of wine with the actual volume of alcohol it contains doesn’t make it easy to tell the amount that would be in a single glass.

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• theKalash@feddit.ch ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I feel like it would be useful to know exactly how much alcohol is in a can or a bottle

  They always list the total volume of the liquid so you can easily get the absolute alcohol content with the percentage.

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• whyNotSquirrel@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I don’t know, but sugar is usually in “g / 100g” so technically in percentage

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  • SomeoneSomewhere@lemmy.nz ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    In beverages, it’s g/100ml.

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    • ebits21@lemmy.ca ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Which is basically the same since 1g of water is 1ml.

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    • vzq@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Alcohol drinks is vol% around here.

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• Kolanaki@yiffit.net ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Should be relatively easy to figure out if you know both the total amount of liquid and the percentage of alcohol.

  100ml bottle that’s 40% ABV would be 40ml of alcohol.

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• howrar@lemmy.ca ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  As a consumer, I think it makes more sense to have the percentage by volume. Firstly, it makes the general pattern of alcohol content much clearer so we get a better intuition of what we’re getting into. Beers generally hover around 5%, wines at 10-15%, and spirits at 20% and above.

  Building on that, people don’t generally remember the volume of pure alcohol they can handle, but they do remember, for example, that three glasses of wine is the most that they should drink. If you’re presented beer, then along with your intuition of their relative alcohol content, you can easily approximate that you can handle about twice as much volume since it’s about half the alcohol by volume. And similar if you have spirits, then you can reduce that volume to half or less.

  How would you estimate it given a volume of alcohol instead? I know I can handle three glasses of this one particular kind of wine. If I have another type of wine with a different alcohol content and different bottle size, I’ll have to math out how much alcohol will be in my glass: (Volume of glass)*(total alcohol context)/(Volume of wine bottle). Most people would give up before even trying to come up with this formula. Now how much alcohol did I have the last time when I had three glasses of wine? The bottle said something like 80ml of alcohol. But how big was it? That’s two large numbers that you need to remember, and since they’re so different from one bottle of wine to the next, you likely don’t remember any of it.

  Secondly, it affected flavour. In general, you can taste how much alcohol is in a certain drink and that depends on the relative volume of alcohol, not the absolute amount.

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• QuarterSwede@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Since everyone pretty much nailed the ABV% answer I’ll take a crack at the other. I’m guessing that the reason they don’t list other ingredients, like what food producers are required to do, is because most countries are concerned about the alcohol content more than anything else that’s in it.

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  • krellor@kbin.social ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    In the US, and I suspect other countries, the agency that regulates alcohol is different than the one that regulates food. In the US alcohol is regulated by the ATF and food by the FDA. Since it is the FDA rules that require nutritional labels and ingredients and not the ATF, most brands don't list much.

    Additionally, alcohol recipes are often considered trade secrets and closely held which might be why rules haven't been introduced in many places.

    Here is an article that talks a little more about different breweries and if they keep their ingredients secret or not.

    https://i.stuff.co.nz/life-style/food-wine/89281511/why-doesnt-alcohol-doesnt-feature-nutritional-information-on-labels

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    • brbposting@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Years ago, for the US I read the answer was lack of demand from consumers.

      Cue ready-to-drink products gaining popularity with newer generations and some have hit the market with nutritional labeling. Would be nice to see it mandatory across the board at this point.

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• pHr34kY@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Australia does this right. Everything has a percentage.

  Nutritional panels have:

  • Serving size
  • Servings in the pack
  • Energy, sugar, fat salt. etc per 100ml or 100g, and per serving.

  Alcoholic beverages have “standard drinks” per bottle which factors in ABV and volume.

  I can quickly see that a drink has 9g sugar per 100ml and know it’s 9% sugar. Easy.

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  • Vash63@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Isn’t this standard everywhere? I know it’s like this in the Netherlands

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    • jmd_akbar@aussie.zone ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      America give something useful for customers? No way… /s

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  • MxM111@kbin.social ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    So, in a drink you show amount of protein as volume per 100ml?

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    • pHr34kY@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Here’s a Starbucks cappuccino marked as 2g of protein per 100ml and 4.4g per serve.

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  • Spyro@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Sucrose has a solubility of about 200 g/100 mL water. I’m in American so I’ve never seen Australian food labels, but would they really label a sugar-saturated drink as having 200% sugar? I guess technically you can do that, but it seems a bit weird. In my experience % is usually reserved for liquid in liquid solutions, like alcoholic beverages.

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    • pHr34kY@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      The best example is the slab ‘o’ Coke from Woolies.

      Sugar is marked as 10.6g/100ml and 39.8g per serve, and 24 serves in the pack.

      Syrups are sold in grams, and maybe that getting 200g of sugar into 100ml of liquid is why.

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  • Cort@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Wouldn’t it be lower than 8% sugar by volume since sugar is more dense than water?

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• fine_sandy_bottom@aussie.zone ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  There are special rules for labelling for alcohol given the obvious risks of consuming more than you realised.

  Here alcohol must show the percentage alcohol content, but alcohol designed to be consumed as-is (without mixing) also states the number of standard drinks.

  The number of standard drinks is the same as the “amount of alcohol” you mentioned.

  Other ingredients like sugar aren’t shown as a percentage because manufacturers don’t want to show it, and it’s not required by law because although there are risks of excess consumption, they’re not “immediate risk to life” type risks.

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  • SomeoneSomewhere@lemmy.nz ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Yeah, NZ & Aus both have a ‘standard drinks’ system.

    My guess is that larger quantities of alcohol (particularly bottles of spirits but also wine) simply aren’t intended to be drunk by one person in one sitting. Total volume of alcohol isn’t that useful; it’s more useful to be able to work out how much is in one shot or one glass.

    This is especially important when you look at the same product being sold by the shot/bottle/cask/barrel, or being able to buy a gallon of it in your own container historically.

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    • r00ty@kbin.life ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Yep, in the UK we have both abv and units of alcohol on most drinks. So you can go by whichever makes most sense for you.

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• douglasg14b@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Don’t most consumables list their volume?

  1liter of beverage at 5% ABV is 50ml of alcohol. For example

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• bouh@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I think alcohol can’t be kept pure in normal conditions, it would turn into a gas. So it is diluted by necessity. Knowing the full volume of the thing is certainly better than knowing only the quantity of alcohol without knowing the degree of dilution.

  It is not the only product to be indicated this way. All diluted chemicals are. I think syrup is also?

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  • subtext@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    The boiling point of pure ethanol is 78°C / 173°F [1], so it would not turn into a gas at normal conditions.

    Pure ethanol is very hard to produce because it forms an azeotrope with water in the ~96% [1] range, meaning it cannot be distilled further than that, it must be separated by other means.

    Alcohol in spirits is usually diluted because of taxes on higher percentage alcohol, consumer preference, or being able to make more bottles with the same amount of ethanol. I believe using percentages for alcohol began when ye olde England was putting taxes based on the percentage of alcohol in the drink [2].

    [1] - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol [2] - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_proof

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    • excitingburp@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      it would not turn into a gas at normal conditions.

      It does: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vapor_pressure. In an airtight container you would have an equilibrium of alcohol vapor and liquid. In open-atmosphere, the atmosphere basically behaves like an infinitely large volume for the vapor - so the alcohol will completely vaporize (and cool the surface it is on in order to do so).

      It’s also trivial to demonstrate by pouring alcohol onto a surface, it disappears in seconds. Same with gasoline and numerous other liquids you’ve surely seen do this (another example is hand sanitizer, which is basically pure alcohol).

      Being diluted doesn’t really help with any of this though. Also alcohol is kept in bottles, which are usually airtight until they are first opened.

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• solidgrue@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Labeling alcohol content by %ABV or %ABW is more versatile than absolute measure. Its also trivial to figure the absolute content given a specific volume.

  In the US at least, there are regulations for packaging and labeling enforced by a federal agency. (I think that agency is Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), but I could be wrong.) The label nust include the %ABV or proof, and must also in specify the volume. Every distiller and brewer must file a label for approval of every product and pay a free before the product can be packaged and sold. The fees are not trivial, and the approval takes time.

  In the US, you can purchase liquor in bottles from 50mL all the way up to 1.75L, beer from 8oz (customary) to 750mL, and wine from 333mL up to a magnum (which volume I don’t know off the top of my head), all with many sizes in between

  Allowing for labeling the alcohol content in %ABV means the producer can package the same product in different sized units using the same approved label across the line. It saves on fees and administrative overhead.

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  • MyDearWatson616@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I don’t mean to nitpick but where have you seen packaged 8oz beers in the US?

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    • Nemo@midwest.social ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      At the corner beer store. They’re called ponies, and while uncommon are definitely a thing.

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• aldalire@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  You wouldn’t take a shot of beer with 5% ABV

  Nor would you take a pitcher of vodka

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• rufus@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I doubt it will be of any benefit. How would it help if you knew that bottle of liqueur contans 125ml of pure alcohol? Or that bottle of Sauvignon Blanc contains 98ml?

  I suppose you need to multiply. And you need to factor in all of that additional info anyways. How much wine do you drink? The whole bottle? How much alcohol can you tolerate? (What do you weigh…)

  But it’s a good question. And sugar, caffeine etc are in fact measured in percentage. At least in europe you always have a measurement per 100ml or 100g written on the packaging, which is kind of a percentage.

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• FuglyDuck@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  To add to this, %ABV is what’s actually measured by distillers when distilling, unless they’re doing it entirely by smell/taste. The first and last parts will have less alchohol since everything evaporates off at different temperatures. (the tail is mostly water. the head, IIRC is mostly methanol or whatever else.)

  The total amount of alchohol changes depending on how it’s packaged or sold off, or if you’re pouring a double, so people will need to do math anyhow; unless it’s a single serving package. (and even then… they might not drink it all. blashphemy, I know.)

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• take6056@feddit.nl ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Just thinking. Maybe there’s a non linear relation between the uptake and the amount of alcohol. As for other products, they usually have a nutritional information table per 100g that you can thus read as percentages.

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