What is an alcohol unit?
What is an alcohol unit?
Why can’t we say one glass of wine is 1 unit or a pint of lager is 1 unit? It’d be a lot easier!
Good question, unfortunately because alcoholic drinks come in different strengths and sizes, we need to measure them in a way that takes those two factors into account, so we use ‘units’.
One unit is 10ml or 8g of pure alcohol.
We can use the below formula to work out how many units are in our favourite drinks:
[Volume (mls) x Alcohol by Volume ABV (%)] / 1000
Examples of how the formula works:
1 small glass of 12% wine:
[125(ml) x 12(%) = 1500]
/ 1000 = 1.5 units.
1 pint of 5.2% beer or cider:
[568(ml) x 5.2(%) = 2840]
/ 1000 = 3 units.
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