Old Wives' Tale Nutrition Medicine
BUSTED Comprehensively false

Beer Before Liquor, Never Sicker

The order of your drinks does not change how drunk or hungover you get

✗ The myth everyone repeats

Beer before liquor, never sicker; liquor before beer, you're in the clear. The drinking rhyme everyone learns young, treated as folk science: get the order of your drinks right and you will dodge the hangover. Different drinks, the logic goes, do different damage depending on sequence.

✓ What is actually true

The order makes no difference, because every standard drink contains the same intoxicant, ethanol, whether it arrives as beer, wine, or spirits. Your body does not care what order the ethanol turned up in; what determines how drunk and how hungover you get is the total amount of alcohol, how fast you drank it, your size, and whether you ate and drank water along the way. Researchers actually ran a controlled trial on this, splitting volunteers into groups who drank beer then wine, or wine then beer, and a third group sticking to one; the order had no significant effect on next-day misery. The rhyme survives because it is catchy and because people who switch drinks are often just people who have had a big, long, mixed night, which is the real reason they feel terrible. So the running order is irrelevant. The volume and the pace wrote the hangover, not the sequence.

Believed 1900โ€“2026
Year Revised 2019
Why Changed Never True
Confidence Fully Debunked
Region Worldwide

Reception

7/10
6/10
The receipts 2 sources
  1. Wikipedia: Ethanol (the intoxicant in all drinks)PRIMARY
  2. Wikipedia: Hangover (causes)REFERENCE

Start typing to search 663 wrong facts