Order and hangovers
Beer before wine — should you skip it? What the study says
No, the order doesn't determine your hangover. A controlled study from Witten/Herdecke and Cambridge with 90 participants found no difference in 2019 between drinking beer before wine and wine before beer. What matters is the total amount of alcohol.
Beer before wine: what does the saying claim?
"Beer before wine, you'll feel fine; wine before beer, you'll feel queer." Few drinking sayings are as well known in German-speaking countries. The idea: if you start with wine and then switch to beer, you'll feel worse the next morning than if you do it the other way around. Similar sayings exist in other languages, such as the English "Beer before liquor, never been sicker," a warning about drinking beer before spirits.
There's already a contradiction worth noting here. Sayings from different countries recommend opposite orders. If the effect of order were as clear-cut as these rhymes claim, they ought to agree. That points more toward an everyday rule of thumb than an observation that's been carefully tested across generations.
What did the 2019 study show?
A research team from the University of Witten/Herdecke and the University of Cambridge investigated the question in 2019 in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. 90 young adults drank, under supervision, either beer first and then wine, wine first and then beer, or just one of the two. A week later, the groups switched, so each person experienced both sequences. The next morning, everyone rated their condition using a questionnaire covering headache, nausea, thirst, and fatigue.
The result was clear. The order had no measurable effect on the severity of the hangover. Two other factors predicted the hangover best: how drunk someone felt the night before and whether they had vomited. Both are closely tied to the amount of alcohol consumed. The researchers summed it up by saying you can't dodge a hangover with a clever drinking order.
Why does the saying persist anyway?
One common explanation is social. Wine was long seen as a drink of the wealthy, beer as the everyday drink of ordinary people. In this picture, switching from wine to beer meant stepping down, while switching from beer to wine meant stepping up. Whether the rhyme really originated this way can't be proven, but the explanation fits the social contrasts of the time.
There's also a plausible everyday observation at play. Anyone who reaches for a beer late in the evening has usually already had quite a bit to drink, and beer tends to be consumed in larger quantities than wine. A glass of beer contains less alcohol per sip, but reach for a third pint and you can easily end up with more alcohol than you realize. The order gets blamed, when really it's the quantity that matters.
Is mixing drinks worse than sticking to one?
Closely related to the drinking saying is a second piece of folk wisdom: that mixing different drinks hits harder than sticking to one type. The 2019 study tested this too. Alongside the two switching groups, there were control groups who drank only beer or only wine all evening, up to a comparable breath alcohol level.
No meaningful difference showed up between these groups either. Someone who drank only beer at a given alcohol level had no measurably lighter hangover the next morning than someone who switched between beer and wine. According to this data, mixing drinks itself doesn't make you sicker. It can, however, make it easy to lose track, since glasses of different sizes and strengths are hard to compare. A pint of 5% beer and a small glass of 12% wine contain roughly the same amount of alcohol, but they look very different.
What the study leaves open
90 people is a lot for a study like this, but still not enough for final conclusions about everyone. The participants were young and healthy, and the drinks were a specific lager and a specific white wine. Whether other drinks — very dark beers or red wine, say — would produce different results, the study doesn't answer.
It also remains unclear how strongly individual congeners, the compounds alongside alcohol in the glass, actually affect hangovers. That's covered in the chapter on hangovers. For practical purposes, the sober lesson stands: no drinking saying protects you from the consequences of quantity. If you want to feel clear-headed the next day, keep the amount low or drink something alcohol-free.