I created the Alcoholometer as a guide to calculate the amount of neat or pure alcohol I was drinking.
Immediately after stopping drinking I started to look more closely at my body and mind. Taking alcohol away allowed me to stand back and take a critical look at the effects it was having on my health.
By having a scout mentality I was able to weigh up the facts and decide if what I had been told for many years, that drinking alcohol was a fun, relaxing pastime that everybody did and to fit in I should go along with the crowd, was true.
According to medical experts, if you drank around half a pint of 100% undiluted alcohol you would almost certainly die. When I got curious about alcohol, I started to work out how much neat or pure alcohol I was drinking.
Towards the end of my drinking days, each week I was drinking roughly: half a bottle of spirits (ABV 40%), 7 bottles of wine (ABV 12.5%) and 6 pints of beer (ABV 5%).
By doing a very quick calculation, using the amount of alcohol content called Alcohol By Volume, or ABV, printed on the side of the bottle, I concluded my neat alcohol intake per week was: 140ml from spirits, 656ml from wine and 199ml from beer. Total 995ml – let’s call it a litre per week. That’s 52 litres or over 100 pints a year!
Who on earth would want to drink 52 litres of neat, undiluted poison each year? That’s equivalent to a whole bath of poison. Over 30 years, that added up to 1,500 litres of pure alcohol. The answer was ‘Me’, but things were about to change for good.
You can find out more about the Alcoholometer in my sessions and courses as well as my book Walking Back To Happiness.
BEER | WINE | SPIRITS | |
AMOUNT CONSUMED | 20 pints per week for a year | 1 X 75cl bottle of wine every night | 2 x double night caps every night |
ABV | 5% ABV | 12.5% ABV | 40% ABV |
AMOUNT OF PURE ALCOHOL CONSUMED IN A YEAR | 29.54 litres | 34.21 litres | 15.12 litres |
© Copyright Nigel Jones 2022. The moral right of the author has been asserted. All rights reserved.