Most of you must have gone through this: You start the evening with a glass of beer, then transition to some vodka shots, enjoy red wine with dinner, and then end the night with a sweet rum cocktail. The next morning comes with a crushing headache and nausea, along with a deep sense of regret. During this, the very first thing to cross our mind is, “This is because I drank different types of alcohol in one single day; I should have stuck to one type.”
Relatable, right? But is this true? Does mixing different types of alcohol really make you more drunk? Let's find out!
The simple and mostly unexpected answer to this question is a firm no. Mixing different types of alcohol does not inherently make you more drunk. In fact, the order in which you drink them also has nothing to do with how alcohol is processed in your body. So why is this myth persisting for years?
Mixing drinks does not get you drunker faster; alcohol is just alcohol. No matter if it is a wine, a whiskey, or a beer, what makes you tipsy is the same, and that is ethanol. What happens once you drink it?
So your liver cannot really understand that the ethanol that has entered it is coming from a gin or beer. Mixing drinks does not create anything different. What makes you drunk is drinking more and more ethanol, especially when you are drinking faster than your poor liver can handle.
Basically, the buzz and hangover completely depend on how much total alcohol has been consumed and not on what you have mixed it with.
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The next question that might have come to your mind is, if that is the case, why do mixing nights feel much more destructive? Well, the reason is human behavior, pacing, and more, as listed below:
The single biggest reason why people get excessively drunk while mixing drinks is that when you mix alcohol, it becomes impossible to track your intake of alcohol. At the same time, if you stick to one single beverage, your brain naturally keeps a check on the pace.
For example, if you consumed two pints of beer, two glasses of wine, 5 shots of vodka, and 2 glasses of rum. So here you have consumed ethanol in various forms in a compressed timeframe in different glasses and serving formats. This led to your brain losing the cumulative volume.
Here you feel drunk not because of the mix; instead, it is because you drank more than you realised.
Bubbles make you feel drunk faster. Drinks that come with fizz, like vodka, champagne, beer plus soda, or gin plus tonic, actually create gas in your stomach. This gas puts pressure on your stomach and pushes the exit door to your small intestine.
Your small intestine absorbs alcohol way faster than your stomach does, and hence the ethanol hits your bloodstreama nd brain faster. Here, the alcohol is not getting stronger; it is getting into you faster because of the bubbles.
The speed of your drinking is also an important factor here. When you drink beer first, it wakes up your stomach. It stretches out, leading to faster absorption of alcohol. After a few beers, you tend to move on to doing shots, which means pouring strong drinks into your stomach at a faster pace. Your BAC spikes and you start feeling sick.
If you start with strong drinks, you usually slow down. Then, when you switch to beer, you take in ethanol much more slowly.
It is not the mix but the speed that matters. Beer first means you drink liquor fast, and liquor first means you usually slow down later. Instead, drink water and pace yourself.
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Mixing different types of alcohol does not make you more drunk. The widespread belief is a classic example of confusion. When people mix drinks, they are mostly drinking faster, losing track of their consumption, drinking in high quantities, and combining carbonated liquids with spirits.
If you want to avoid severe intoxication and a crazy hangover the next morning, I would suggest you focus on the following things:
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Your liver does not know which spirit or beer is bringing in ethanol. All it knows is to clean up, so if you stay hydrated and pace yourself, you can help your liver to clean up better. This will result in fewer chances of getting completely drunk and severe headaches the next morning.
