How many beers in a bottle of wine?

I am blessed to be living in Northern Virginia where it almost seems every week there is a new winery or brewery popping up around every turn. Heck, some places are a winery/brewery combo! So it got me thinking...how many beers equal a bottle of wine? Specifically in terms of alcohol or ABV.

First - what is ABV? Well...it stands for alcohol by volume. It remains the standard means of measuring the amount of alcohol in any liquid. To nerd out a bit - it is defined as the percentage of ethanol (alcohol) present in 100 milliliters of liquid when said liquid is at a temperature of 68 degrees Fahrenheit.

Before the finicky amongst you start pointing out that different types of beer and wine have different levels of ABV - I'm going to make this calculation simple and keep it at averages. So...a 750ml bottle of wine will be considered 12% ABV and a 12 oz bottle or can of beer with be at 5% ABV. With that squared away - let's simplify it even more by determining the "units of alcohol" for each drink we are comparing.

The equation looks like this:

ABV (%) x Volume (ml) ÷ 1,000 = Number of Alcohol Units

So for the wine...12% x 750 ÷ 1,000 = 9 units

And the beer... 5% x 354 ml (5 oz) ÷ 1,000 = 1.77 units

To determine how many cans of beer you would drink to equal one bottle; we divide the wine alcohol units by the beer alcohol units!

Wine 9 units ÷ Beer 1.77 units = 5.08 cans of beer to one bottle of wine

So there it is...on average - there is 5 beers in a standard bottle of wine!

Now..which would you prefer though???