Mixing beer and wine in a single drinking session is perfectly fine from a physiological standpoint, and the order you drink them in does not affect how sick you feel the next day. A randomized controlled trial that directly tested the old “beer before wine and you’ll feel fine” saying found no significant difference in hangover severity regardless of which drink came first. What matters is the total amount of alcohol you consume, how fast you drink it, and whether you ate beforehand. The folklore around mixing drinks has a grip on popular culture that far outweighs its scientific support.
The “Beer Before Wine” Saying, Put to the Test
The proverb exists in some form across many languages and cultures. In English, it’s “beer before wine and you’ll feel fine; wine before beer and you’ll feel queer.” Germans have their own version, and so do the French. Despite centuries of repetition, only one well-designed trial has directly tested whether the claim holds up.
Researchers at Witten/Herdecke University in Germany ran a crossover study in which volunteers were split into groups and given controlled amounts of beer and wine in different orders, then switched the order on a second occasion. A third group drank only beer or only wine. Hangover severity was scored the following morning using a validated scale. The result was clear: none of the groups had a significantly different hangover rating based on the order they drank, and the primary comparison between the two mixed-order groups showed no meaningful difference at all.1The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Grape or grain but never the twain? A randomized controlled multiarm matched-triplet crossover trial of beer and wine The study controlled for total alcohol intake, so the groups were consuming equivalent amounts of ethanol. The folklore, it turns out, is just folklore.
The strongest predictors of a bad hangover in that trial were the ones you would expect: how drunk participants felt at the end of the night and whether they vomited. The sequence of beverages was irrelevant. If you’ve ever felt worse after mixing beer and wine, the explanation almost certainly lies elsewhere.
Why Mixing Feels Worse Than It Is
If the order doesn’t matter, why does mixing drinks have such a bad reputation? The answer is mostly behavioral. When people switch from beer to wine, or wine to beer, they tend to lose track of how much alcohol they’ve actually had. A pint of beer and a glass of wine contain different volumes of liquid but often similar amounts of ethanol. Switching between the two makes mental accounting harder, and people end up drinking more than they realize.
Pacing also shifts. Even the shape of the glass you’re drinking from changes how fast you consume its contents. One study found that people drank about 60% slower from a straight-sided glass than from a curved one, and this effect held only for alcoholic beverages, suggesting it’s tied to how well people can estimate the halfway point of their drink.2PubMed Central. Glass shape influences consumption rate for alcoholic beverages Now imagine switching from a pint glass to a wine glass mid-evening. Your internal sense of how fast you’re going and how much remains gets scrambled.
There’s also a social dimension. Evenings that involve multiple types of drinks tend to be longer, more festive, and more loosely managed. A quiet dinner with a single bottle of wine looks very different from a night that starts with beers at a bar, moves to wine at dinner, and ends with a nightcap. The mixing didn’t cause the hangover; the occasion did.
Your Body Doesn’t Care Which Drink Came First
Ethanol is ethanol. Whether it arrived in a lager or a cabernet, your liver breaks it down through the same two-step process. First, the enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase converts ethanol into acetaldehyde, a toxic intermediate. Then a second enzyme, aldehyde dehydrogenase, converts acetaldehyde into acetate, which is harmless and eventually cleared as carbon dioxide and water.3PubMed. Overview of the role of alcohol dehydrogenase and aldehyde dehydrogenase and their variants in the genesis of alcohol-related pathology This pathway operates at a relatively fixed rate. It doesn’t speed up because you switched from one type of drink to another, and it doesn’t slow down because two types of alcohol are in the queue.
The hangover itself is driven largely by the total ethanol burden and the inflammatory response it triggers. Research using both blood and saliva samples has consistently shown that hangover severity tracks with markers of inflammation like IL-6 and TNF-alpha, and that these markers rise in proportion to the amount of alcohol consumed rather than the type.4PubMed Central. The Inflammatory Response to Alcohol Consumption and Its Role in the Pathology of Alcohol Hangover A separate naturalistic study confirmed that the immune system responds to heavy intake with elevated inflammatory cytokines the morning after, regardless of what was drunk.5PubMed Central. Immune Responses after Heavy Alcohol Consumption: Cytokine Concentrations in Hangover-Sensitive and Hangover-Resistant Drinkers Your immune system is reacting to how much ethanol it had to deal with, not what label was on the bottle.
Carbonation Can Change How Fast Alcohol Hits You
One thing that does differ between beer and wine is carbonation. Most beers are carbonated; most wines are not (sparkling wines being the obvious exception). Carbonation has a measurable effect on how quickly alcohol enters your bloodstream. In a controlled study, about two-thirds of participants absorbed alcohol faster when it was mixed with a carbonated liquid compared to a still one, and the average absorption rate was significantly higher with the fizzy version.6PubMed. Alcohol concentration and carbonation of drinks: the effect on blood alcohol levels
This doesn’t mean beer gets you drunk faster than wine in any absolute sense, because the alcohol concentrations are different and you drink them at different speeds. But it does mean that the carbonation in beer can push ethanol into your system a bit more rapidly than a still wine of comparable strength would. If you’re alternating between the two, the effect is unlikely to make a noticeable practical difference. Where it becomes more relevant is if you’re mixing spirits with carbonated mixers and alternating with still drinks, since the absorption swings could be larger. The effect also varied between individuals in the study, with about a third of participants showing no change or even slower absorption with carbonation.
Food Matters More Than Drink Order
The most powerful variable in how your body handles alcohol on any given evening is whether you have food in your stomach. When solid food is present, gastric emptying slows dramatically, and alcohol absorption slows with it. One study found a close correlation (r ≥ 0.91) between how quickly liquid emptied from the stomach and how quickly alcohol was absorbed. Drinking on an empty stomach produced the fastest absorption; drinking with or after food was significantly slower.7PubMed. Relationships between gastric emptying of solid and caloric liquid meals and alcohol absorption Food also increases what’s called first-pass metabolism, meaning more ethanol is broken down before it ever reaches your general circulation.8Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research. Interaction of Prandial State and Beverage Concentration on Alcohol Absorption
So if you’re choosing between worrying about whether to start with beer or wine and worrying about whether to eat dinner first, the dinner question is orders of magnitude more important. A solid meal before or during drinking is the single most effective thing you can do to moderate your blood alcohol level, short of drinking less.
Wine-Specific Sensitivities Are Real
While mixing beer and wine won’t cause a worse hangover than sticking to one, some people do notice they feel particularly bad after wine specifically. This isn’t about mixing; it’s about compounds that are more concentrated in wine than in beer.
Wine, especially red wine, contains higher levels of histamine and other biogenic amines. People who are low in diamine oxidase, the enzyme that breaks down histamine in the gut, can react to red wine with flushing, headaches, and nasal congestion that look a lot like an allergic reaction but technically aren’t one.9PubMed Central. Allergic and intolerance reactions to wine White wine, meanwhile, tends to contain more sulfites, which can trigger reactions in people with asthma or sulfite sensitivity.9PubMed Central. Allergic and intolerance reactions to wine
Wine has also been studied specifically as a headache trigger, and the leading hypothesis involves phenolic flavonoid compounds that may interfere with serotonin metabolism in the brain.10PubMed. Wine and headache If you’re someone who gets a headache from two glasses of red wine but can drink the equivalent alcohol in beer without problems, you’re reacting to something in the wine, not to alcohol alone. Adding beer to the equation won’t make the wine-specific sensitivity worse or better. It will just add more total alcohol to the evening.
What Beer and Wine Do to Your Stomach
Both beer and wine are strong stimulants of gastric acid secretion, more so than drinks with higher alcohol content. Research has found that beer stimulates acid production at levels comparable to the stomach’s maximum output, which is a surprisingly powerful effect for a low-strength drink. Wine has a similar though slightly less extreme effect. The compounds responsible in beer are still not fully identified, but they appear to be thermostable and unrelated to the alcohol itself.11PubMed Central. Alcohol and gastric acid secretion in humans
If you’re mixing beer and wine in one sitting, you’re stacking two potent acid stimulants on top of each other. For most people with healthy stomachs, this won’t cause problems beyond some mild discomfort. But if you’re prone to acid reflux, gastritis, or peptic ulcers, mixing the two could be more irritating than sticking with a single drink type simply because you’re bathing your stomach lining in acid-promoting compounds for a longer period. The practical takeaway isn’t to avoid mixing, though. It’s to eat something substantial and not drink on an empty stomach, which circles back to the food point discussed earlier.
Gender Differences in How Alcohol Is Processed
One variable that makes a real difference in how any drinking session feels, whether mixed or single-beverage, is sex. Women generally reach higher blood alcohol levels than men after consuming the same amount of ethanol per unit of body weight, and the reasons go beyond body size. Research shows that women have less first-pass metabolism of alcohol in the stomach, particularly at moderate and high alcohol concentrations, due to lower activity of certain gastric enzymes. Women also have a smaller volume of distribution for alcohol and slower gastric emptying (about 42% slower in one study), meaning ethanol enters the bloodstream more gradually but lingers at higher concentrations.12PubMed. Gender differences in pharmacokinetics of alcohol
This doesn’t change the advice about mixing versus not mixing. It does mean that if a man and a woman split a bottle of wine and then share a few beers, the woman is likely dealing with a higher effective dose of alcohol even if they drank identical amounts. The mixing didn’t create the disparity; the underlying biology did. But since mixed-drink evenings tend to make total consumption harder to track, the effect can compound.
Practical Considerations If You Plan to Mix
If you enjoy both beer and wine and want to have some of each during an evening, there’s no physiological reason not to. A few things will make the experience more comfortable:
- Track total alcohol: A standard glass of wine (about 150 ml at 12-13% alcohol) and a standard pint of beer (about 470 ml at 5% alcohol) contain roughly similar amounts of ethanol. Keep a mental tally of standard drinks rather than thinking in glasses.
- Eat before and during: A solid meal slows absorption dramatically and increases the amount of alcohol broken down before it reaches your bloodstream. This is the single most impactful thing you can do.
- Watch your pace: Switching drink types tends to reset your sense of how fast you’re drinking. Pay attention to clock time between drinks, not just how full the glass feels.
- Hydrate: Alcohol suppresses vasopressin, a hormone that tells your kidneys to retain water, so you lose more fluid than you take in. Drinking water between alcoholic drinks helps offset this, regardless of what types you’re mixing.
When “Mixing” Actually Does Matter
There is one scenario where combining different types of alcohol genuinely matters, and it has nothing to do with beer versus wine. When people mix alcohol with energy drinks or other stimulants, the caffeine masks the sedative effects of alcohol, making people feel less drunk than they actually are. This leads to measurably higher consumption and more risk-taking behavior. That’s a real and well-documented concern.
Similarly, mixing spirits with carbonated mixers versus still ones can change absorption speed, as noted earlier. But beer and wine are both relatively low-strength, fermented beverages consumed at similar paces in similar social contexts. The pharmacological overlap between them is far greater than the difference. If you were going to worry about any mixing scenario, energy drinks and spirits deserve the attention. Beer followed by wine, or wine followed by beer, deserves approximately none.
People with wine-specific intolerances, particularly to histamine or sulfites, have a separate and legitimate reason to be cautious about adding wine to any drinking occasion. But that’s about the wine itself, not about the combination. If red wine gives you a headache when you drink it alone, it will give you a headache when you drink it alongside beer, too. The solution is to either avoid that particular trigger or look for wines with lower histamine or sulfite content, rather than to avoid mixing per se.