Does Fruit Brandy Give You Worse Headaches Than Vodka? Hangovers and Congeners

What Triggers a Hangover: Alcohol Quantity Comes First

The morning after a long night out, almost everyone has an explanation ready. It was the cheap wine, the fruit brandy at the end, the mixing of drinks. Hangover research paints a more sober picture. The most important factor is the total amount of alcohol the body has to break down.

Breaking down alcohol produces acetaldehyde, an intermediate compound that contributes to nausea and headache. Alcohol also disrupts sleep, draws water out of the body, and can trigger inflammatory responses. These processes play out the same way with fruit brandy, vodka, beer, and wine. How severe the hangover turns out depends first on how much was drunk, and only after that on what was in the glass.

Congeners Under Suspicion: Methanol, Fusel Oils, Aldehydes

Besides ethanol, the drinking alcohol, beverages contain many congeners. These include methanol, fusel oils (heavier alcohols with a strong odor), as well as aldehydes and esters. They contribute a great deal to aroma. Vodka is produced to be as neutral as possible and contains few of them. A fruit brandy, by contrast, deliberately retains some, since it's meant to taste of fruit.

A well-known American study looked at the influence of such congeners. A team led by psychologist Damaris Rohsenow compared bourbon with vodka in 2010 in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research. Participants rated the hangover after bourbon, which contains far more congeners, as worse. Yet on tests of attention and reaction time the next morning, they performed equally poorly after both drinks.

Methanol and Hangovers: A Hypothesis, Not Proof

With fruit brandy, suspicion often falls on methanol. The idea: the body mainly breaks down methanol once ethanol levels in the blood have dropped, producing more toxic byproducts in the process. That would explain why the hangover is often worst the next morning. This explanation is discussed in hangover research. It's not proven, and there's no direct comparison of fruit brandy against vodka.

That fruit brandy contains more methanol than vodka is beyond dispute, since the raw material brings that with it. The EU allows up to 1,350 grams per hectoliter of pure alcohol in fruit brandy depending on the fruit, while a neutral vodka contains almost none. But that doesn't automatically mean a worse hangover. A carefully distilled fruit brandy can sit well below the limit, and how strongly individual congeners act on the body in typical amounts remains unclear. So if you have a headache the next day, look first at how many glasses you had.

From the same hypothesis comes the old bar-room wisdom about a morning-after hair of the dog. More alcohol might delay methanol breakdown, but it doesn't end the hangover, it just prolongs the strain on the liver and circulation. A hangover is the body's signal that it's hit its limit. No trick makes it vanish, only time, water, and sleep get you through it.

Beer on Wine, Schnapps to Finish: Does the Order Matter?

Beer after wine, leave it be, goes an old saying, and many people blame their hangover on mixing drinks. Researchers from Witten/Herdecke University and the University of Cambridge tested this in 2019 in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Ninety volunteers drank beer and wine in different orders, while a comparison group drank only one or the other. A week later, the groups switched.

The order made no meaningful difference to the hangover. The strongest link was with how drunk participants felt and whether they'd vomited. So mixing drinks isn't really the problem, the total amount consumed is. For fruit brandy, that means: it's not the type in the glass that determines the morning after, but how many glasses there were.