For a serious discussion about the cost of drinking, and what's a really cheap drink, it's important to compare apples to apples to apples.
In other words, you need to look at the cost of a "standard drink." As defined by the alcoholic beverage industry, it's a beverage containing .6 oz of pure alcohol. In other words, it's a 12 oz. full strength* beer, a 5 oz glass of table wine, or 1.5 oz of 80 proof spirits. They are equal to each other in raising blood alcohol levels, which is what gives a person that pleasant relaxed feeling or buzz, which is the basic reason why people drink alcohol in the first place.
For 80 proof liquor a 750ml bottle is 23.4 oz, or 15.6 standard 1.5 oz drinks.
A 1.75 liter bottle is 59.2 oz, or 39.4 standard drinks.
For simplicity of calculation, I'll use the price of an inexpensive, but not bottom level
vodka around these parts... $10 for 1.75 l. (ignoring taxes) That calculates out at
25.4 cents per shot.
OK, then what would the price of a typical bottle of
wine have to be to match that price of just over a quarter for a standard drink? At 5 oz per drink, and 23.4 oz in a bottle, (or 4.7 drinks) that bottle would have to sell for $1.19.
And at a low, low price of $2.99 for Two Buck Chuck, you'd be spending
63.6 cents a drink.
For
beer, 12 oz full strength* beers would have to sell for $1.52 a sixpack to give you a standard drink for just over a quarter. Not happening, right? And at a price of $5.00 for 6 cheapo beers, the price would be
83.3 cents a drink.
*Now here comes the irony, to me... I regularly see impoverished college boys in search of cheap drinking material buying suitcases of LIGHT beer, apparently missing the point that Light beers only have about 85% as much alcohol as regular beers. But the goofy thing is, light beers are generally sold at the same price as regular beers (which is why beer companies promote them so heavily, since they are HIGHER PROFIT!!) So a sixpack of
light beer = about 5.1 standard drinks, so that same $5 price for 6 yields a price of
98 cents for a standard drink.
Obviously this comparison ignores such factors as taste, preferences, possible mixers or garnishes, etc. but strictly looking at cost for equivalent hooch-power among inexpensive beverages, as we have shown here, cheap beer is more expensive than cheap wine, and cheap wine is more expensive than cheap vodka.
Whatever your choice, as we say in Hawai'i, Okole Maluna!
(Translation, Bottoms Up!)
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