Drinking Beer in the Name of Science – and Justice!

Kentucky’s craft beer industry is booming. With award winning breweries like Country Boy, West Sixth, and Against the Grain, just to name a few, people from across the state are enjoying high quality, local craft beers. And that got us here at Baldani Law Group thinking: how much craft beer does it take to get someone over the legal limit to drive? Every week we receive calls from individuals that have been charged with a DUI. A lot of those individuals only had a couple of drinks while hanging out with friends or eating dinner. They didn’t feel like they were over the limit, but the Portable Breath Test (PBT) the officer asked them to take told a different story.

So, we put together an experiment to test out some local craft beers and see how much we had to drink before we were over the limit. We asked some of our friends to help us with this video (shout out to Abe and Zac), so we could get a range of heights, weights, and genders. For the experiment, each of the four participants picked two to three different craft beers. Each of the craft beers had an Alcohol By Volume (ABV) of 7% or greater. We were required to drink the beer within one hour. After the hour we each measured our alcohol concentration using a PBT. We made sure to wait the 15 minute required waiting period after taking our last sip so we wouldn’t run into issues with mouth alcohol. We learned from our experiment that most of our group was over the legal limit or almost over the legal limit after just a couple of beers. So, if you’ve had two or more craft beers with high alcohol content, it’s probably a good bet that you are over the legal limit no matter how big or small you are.

To learn more about our experiment and see how it unfolded in real-time, check out the video above. It has more explanation about the science behind determining alcohol concentration – and reviews of some of our local craft beers.