Fun With Beer Math

Do you have any idea how much money you've spent on alcohol in your life? Any clue how many calories you've consumed in beer? Could you fill a swimming pool with the amount of beer you've consumed? How far could a line of beer cans and bottles (representing your consumption) stretch if you put them end to end?

To answer these and other questions, we first have to get some gauge on how much we've consumed in our lives. For me, I am throwing out the one or two drinking episodes I had before college, simply to make the math easier. First, I will determine the easiest thing to estimate, the number of total alcoholic drinks I have consumed in my college career.

I started in the Fall of 2004. I did not drink heavily for much of that semester, but because I am going to err on the safe side and estimate lower-end numbers through the rest of this experiment, I feel this will come out in a wash.

I have been drinking on a very consistent basis since September of 2004. That is 3 years and 5 months. This equates to about 179 weeks of drinking. I would say that an average of 3 nights per week drinking is a very honest and accurate guess, without overestimating. This gives me a total of 537 drinking experiences. That seems like A LOT. This is already fun.

Now, on many of those occasions, as my friends will tell you, I have had a tendency to put down quite a few drinks. I would say that an average of ten standard drinks (defined as a shot of liquor or a 12 oz. can of beer) is a very fair estimate for each night of drinking. This is college, after all. That means I have consumed approximately 5370 alcoholic drinks in college. (To put that in perspective, I have been alive approximately 8200 days.)

Alright, that is all well and good, but now for the real fun we need to start breaking this down. I would estimate that approximately 80% of my alcohol consumption in college has been in the form of beer. While it started out perhaps 60-40 in favor of liquor, the last two-and-a-half years have seen me drinking almost exclusively beer (to avoid the kinds of awful, awful decisions and expansive blackouts that often occur when I try to drink liquor all night long).

This means that I have consumed roughly 4296 beers and 1074 shots. A standard shot is 1.5 ounces of liquor. This means I have consumed 716 ounces or 21.2 liters of straight liquor in my three-and-a-half years at the U of M. I have also consumed roughly 179 cases of beer in this time.

How much is that, really? Well, that is 403 gallons of beer. This is roughly enough to fill an average bathtub 10 times, or this aquarium once. In addition to liquid volumes, there is also waste to be considered. 179 cardboard cases of beer. Nearly 4300 bottles and cans and 22 plastic and glass liter bottles. The average can weighs about 15 grams. If the 4300 beers were all cans, which weigh less than bottles, they would weigh a collective 142 pounds. If you stacked the cans end to end, each can being approximately 4.5 inches tall, they would stretch for nearly five-and-a-half football fields. 1613 feet. If stacked on top of one another as a free standing structure, this tower of cans would qualify as the 6th tallest structure in the world. It would stand some 130 feet higher than the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur.

An average shot has about 130 calories, and the average 12 oz. beer has around 150. This means I've consumed approximately 139,620 calories in liquor, and another 644,000 calories in beer, in my college career. This gives a total of 783,620 calories in alcohol consumption. Eating 2000 calories a day, a person consumes 730,000 calories in their meals in a year.

How long would it take to consume all of that booze again? According to several online BAC calculators, I can consume 8 drinks every 5 hours and stay at a BAC of .07. In order to drink all of these 5370 alcoholic beverages, while remaining under the legal limit of .08, I would have to drink for approximately 3356 hours. That is about 140 consecutive days of constant drinking, without sleep.

What about blackouts? How much of my life has slipped into the chasm of a blacked-out state? As stated earlier, I have consumed alcohol, at least somewhat heavily, about 537 times. As an estimate, I would say that I have experienced some form of blackout on about 10% of these occasions. 53 times that I have lost part or all of an evening. These blackouts have ranged from a half-hour to several hours, up to 5 I'd say. An average blackout, then, is probably around 2 hours. That is 106 hours, or about 4.5 days. Four-and-a-half days that I was alive, but have absolutely no memories... that's kind of frightening.

Then there's the money. Even though a large number of these drinks were consumed in bars, I will calculate the costs as though I purchased it all in liquor stores, in order to not exaggerate the costs. 179 cases of beer. The average case of beer, with tax, costs me around $18. That is $3222 dollars worth of beer. 22 liters of liquor. The average bottle probably costs me about $20. That's an additional $440 in liquor. $3662 dollars worth of alcohol is a very conservative estimate for my 3+ years in college. That is much more than the $1900 or so I have spent on books, and a little more than 8 months of my rent here in Minneapolis.

I can't stress enough the fact that, for me, these are conservative estimates. In reality, the numbers could be far greater, but are almost certainly not any less than those I have published here. It really puts in perspective the massive amounts of alcohol that can be consumed by just one college student. In writing this, I have gained a lot of perspective about my own drinking habits. Above all, I have a significantly renewed respect for my liver. Keep up the good work, buddy. I promise it will all be better someday. Maybe.