Wine before beer, or beer before wine? Either way, you’ll be hungover

Most people will at some point in their life experience one of many the downsides of excess drinking: the hangover. Importantly, hangovers can lead to reduced productivity, impaired performance (including missing work or academic underperformance) and even risk to daily tasks such driving or operating heavy machinery.

Wine before beer, or beer before wine? Photo: Kaihsu Tai/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Hangover symptoms occur when higher-than-normal blood alcohol concentrations drop back to zero.

Surprisingly, the phenomenon is not particularly understood, though it is thought that their underlying causes include dehydration, our immune response, and disturbances of our metabolism and hormone. Hangovers are likely to be influenced by ingredients other than the pure alcohol content.

Colourings and flavourings have been suggested as making hangovers worse, which might explain why, at the same alcohol concentration, Bourbon causes a more severe hangover than vodka.

There are no effective hangover remedies – instead, societies appear to rely on folk remedies (such as ‘hair of the dog’) and old folk sayings.

Such sayings exist in numerous languages: other examples in English include "Grape or grain, but never the twain”, while Germans claim “Wein auf Bier, das rat’ ich Dir—Bier auf Wein, das lass’ sein” and the French say “Bière sur vin est venin, vin sur bière est belle manière”.

There is little evidence available to support or refute these sayings, so, to put an end to this uncertainty, researchers at Witten/Herdecke University in Germany and the University of Cambridge in the UK evaluated scientifically whether or not this time-honoured wisdom truly reduces a hangover burden.

Ninety volunteers, aged between 19 and 40 years old, were recruited and split into three groups. The first group consumed around two and a half pints of beer followed by four large glasses of wine. The second group consumed the same amounts of alcohol, but in reverse order. Subjects in the third, control group consumed either only beer or only wine.

The big strength of this study was its crossover design: a week later, participants in study groups one and two were switched to the opposite drinking order. Control group subjects who drank only beer the first time around received only wine on the second study day (and vice versa). This way, the groups were not only compared to each other, but each participant was their own control, too.

The researchers found that none of the three groups had a significantly different hangover score with different orders of alcoholic drinks.

Women tended to have slightly worse hangovers than men. While neither blood and urine tests, nor factors such as age, sex, body weight, drinking habits and hangover frequency, helped to predict hangover intensity, vomiting and perceived drunkenness were associated with heavier hangover.

Dr Kai Hensel, a senior clinical fellow at the University of Cambridge says that there were two main reasons for carrying you the study. “Firstly,” he says, “a clear result in favour of one particular order could help to reduce hangovers and help many people have a better day after a long night out – though we encourage people to drink responsibly.

Unfortunately, we found that there was no way to avoid the inevitable hangover just by favouring one order over another." (University of Cambridge)

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