88
Why is alcohol measured in percentages?
(lemmy.world)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2023
88 points (88.6% liked)
No Stupid Questions
35764 readers
1139 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
That still doesn't give us a reason why customers have this special calculated value. You could just multiply the volume by this percentage to get the absolute value. Why is the percentage preferred over the volume? I see no reason for either side.
Like I said, because the percent doesn't change with the volume served. If you are an 1800s brewer you can calculate the ABV from samples, and subsequently sell kegs of various sizes, bottles, which in turn can be served in various amounts and the percent doesn't change. And the industry never changed, nor the laws written. So it's the way it is because that is how they used to do it and how laws were written and there hadn't been a motivation for people to change that.
In a word - tradition.
Yup.
We do lots of things as a society because we've always done them that way, or it's good enough, and not enough reason to go through the effort of changing everything including legal language, etc.
Happily, in this case I think ABV is about the best way we could have inherited, maybe only second to alcohol by weight in terms of consistency across temperature.
Also, it's practical. If you know something is twice as concentrated (12% instead of 6%) you know to drink it more carefully, rather than if you get a jug of something and it just says how much alcohol is in there, then you have to mentally calibrate how strong it is by considering the volume of the jug vs. how much alcohol there is.
You have to print a separate label for each bottle size then. Much easier to print something like '10% strength' and slap the same label on all of your barrels and bottles regardless of their volume.
You still have to show total volume on each bottle. So the label is different anyway. Plus, it could have been done as they do to show singer content - amount per serving size and servings per container.
Present age does nearly the same thing though. 20% simply means 20ml in serving size of 100ml.