On St. Patrick’s Day some of us were sitting around the bar drinking green beer and downing green Jello shots, and one of my drinking buddies grabbed a straw and started slurping his beer with it.  “You know, you get drunk faster if you drink beer with a straw,” he told me.  Of course, I’ve heard that ever since college.  Is it true?  I decided to do a little research.

The best answer I could find was on this forum, and according to the post’s author, yes, you do get drunk faster with a straw.  He gave two reasons:

• When you sip beer through a straw, it creates a vacuum that lowers the boiling point of alcohol below the normal 79 degrees C.  Therefore, more alcohol vapors get into the lungs, and these vapors get absorbed into the bloodstream much more quickly.
• Because the beer enters the mouth via a very narrow jet, it has more surface area.  Therefore, more alcohol can evaporate before the beer is swallowed.  The palate, rich in blood vessels, absorbs these vapors, again getting more alcohol into the bloodstream more quickly.

So you do get drunk faster, although the overall amount of alcohol consumed is the same.

Whether you use a straw or not, be sure to sip your beer from some of our fine beer mugs.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 22nd, 2009 at 12:27 pm and is filed under beer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.