The Outcast
12-24-2005, 07:51 PM
By Nanci Hellmich, USA TODAY
If you'd like to make a toast this holiday season without getting too tipsy, try using a tall, slender highball glass rather than a short tumbler, according to a study by a leading food psychology researcher.
People tend to pour about 20% to 30% more alcohol in short glasses than taller ones.
"From a party-host perspective, if you don't want people to over-imbibe, try to use the taller, skinnier glasses," says Brian Wansink, director of Cornell University's Food and Brand Lab, who conducted the study when he taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Wansink and his colleagues recruited 198 students at the University of Illinois who met the legal drinking age and 86 bartenders in Philadelphia. They gave the students rum and whiskey bottles that had been filled with brown tea, and gin and vodka bottles filled with water. Then they asked the students to pour a 1.5-ounce shot of alcohol (without using a shot glass) into tumblers or highball glasses as if they were preparing one of four popular mixed drinks: vodka tonic, rum and Coke, whiskey on the rocks, and gin and tonic.
The bartenders were asked to make the same four mixed drinks using a standard amount of real alcohol but without measuring. The students and professionals both used 11-ounce tumblers and 11-ounce highball glasses.
As reported in the current issue of the British Medical Journal, Wansink found that the students poured about 2 ounces in the short glasses and close to the right amount of 1.5 ounces in the tall ones.
Even the bartenders, with an average of six years' experience, missed the mark. They poured about 1.8 ounces into the short glasses but were fairly accurate with the tall, skinny ones.
If you'd like to make a toast this holiday season without getting too tipsy, try using a tall, slender highball glass rather than a short tumbler, according to a study by a leading food psychology researcher.
People tend to pour about 20% to 30% more alcohol in short glasses than taller ones.
"From a party-host perspective, if you don't want people to over-imbibe, try to use the taller, skinnier glasses," says Brian Wansink, director of Cornell University's Food and Brand Lab, who conducted the study when he taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Wansink and his colleagues recruited 198 students at the University of Illinois who met the legal drinking age and 86 bartenders in Philadelphia. They gave the students rum and whiskey bottles that had been filled with brown tea, and gin and vodka bottles filled with water. Then they asked the students to pour a 1.5-ounce shot of alcohol (without using a shot glass) into tumblers or highball glasses as if they were preparing one of four popular mixed drinks: vodka tonic, rum and Coke, whiskey on the rocks, and gin and tonic.
The bartenders were asked to make the same four mixed drinks using a standard amount of real alcohol but without measuring. The students and professionals both used 11-ounce tumblers and 11-ounce highball glasses.
As reported in the current issue of the British Medical Journal, Wansink found that the students poured about 2 ounces in the short glasses and close to the right amount of 1.5 ounces in the tall ones.
Even the bartenders, with an average of six years' experience, missed the mark. They poured about 1.8 ounces into the short glasses but were fairly accurate with the tall, skinny ones.