Study: Beer before liquor adage doesn’t hold true for hangover intensity

If you’re of drinking age, you’ve likely heard the old sayings: Beer before liquor, never been sicker. Liquor before beer, in the clear. (Or something along those lines.)

Almost anybody who has switched from beer to shots has felt the consequences the next day with a wicked hangover.

But is there any actual evidence to support those sayings?

That’s what researchers at Germany’s Witten/Herdecke University tried to find out. Recently published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, the study’s focus was to determine whether the order of beer and wine consumption played a part in a hangover’s intensity.

Participants — ranging in age from 19 to 40 and evenly split by gender — were split into three groups. The first group drank beer until their blood alcohol concentration was 0.05 percent and then switched to wine until they reached 0.11 percent. The second group reversed the wine and beer orders. (The control group drank either only beer or only wine.) The next week, the groups switched to the opposite order.

The study featured a Carlsberg Pilsner lager (5 percent alcohol content) and a 2015 Edelgräfler white wine (11 .1 percent alcohol content).

Researchers concluded that the drinking order played no part in hangover intensity.

“We were unable to confirm that the well-known folklore of drinking ‘beer before wine’ purportedly results in a worse hangover than drinking ‘wine before beer,'” researchers wrote. “Although this should rob tactical drinkers of the belief that they can reduce the aftereffects of a heavy night out by careful ordering of beverages, our findings suggest that ‘perceived drunkenness’ and ‘vomiting’ are useful predictors of misery in the morning after the night before.”

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See also, What You Need To Know To Avoid Getting Frostbite

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