Glass shape influences how quickly we down alcohol

Glass shape influences how quickly we down alcohol
Washington: How quickly you consume down an alcoholic drink may depend on the shape of the glass you’re drinking from, a new study has suggested.

For the study, Dr Angela Attwood and colleagues from Bristol’s School of Experimental Psychology recruited 160 social drinkers aged 18-40 with no history of alcoholism to attend two experimental sessions.

During one session they were asked to drink either lager or a non-alcoholic soft drink from either a straight-sided glass or a curved ‘beer flute’.

They found that the participants were almost twice as slow when drinking alcohol from the straight-sided glass as compared to the curved glass.

However, there was no difference in drinking rates from the glasses when the drink was non-alcoholic.




Importantly, the degree of this error seemed to be associated with the speed of drinking – the participants who tended to show the greatest error in their halfway judgments tended to show the greatest changes in drinking rate.


Therefore, slower drinking rates is likely to have positive impact on the individual and also at a population level.

“Due to the personal and societal harms associated with heavy bouts of drinking, there has been a lot of recent interest in alcohol control strategies. While many people drink alcohol responsibly, it is not difficult to have ‘one too many’ and become intoxicated. Because of the negative effects alcohol has on decision making and control of behaviour, this opens us up to a number of risks,” Dr Attwood said.

“People often talk of ‘pacing themselves’ when drinking alcohol as a means of controlling levels of drunkenness, and I think the important point to take from our research is that the ability to pace effectively may be compromised when drinking from certain types of glasses,” she added.