Yes, you can mix wine and beer in the same sitting without any special health risk. The order you drink them in doesn’t matter either. What determines how you feel the next day is the total amount of alcohol you consume, not whether you mixed drink types. A 2019 randomized controlled trial published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition tested this directly and found that neither the type nor the order of alcoholic beverages significantly affected hangover intensity.
The “Beer Before Wine” Myth, Tested
You’ve probably heard some version of “beer before wine and you’ll feel fine, wine before beer and you’ll feel queer.” Researchers at Witten/Herdecke University in Germany designed a rigorous experiment to test exactly this. They split participants into groups that drank beer then wine, wine then beer, or only one type, then had everyone switch on a later session. The result: drink order made no measurable difference in hangover severity. The only reliable predictor of a bad hangover was how drunk people felt while drinking and whether they vomited. In other words, your body doesn’t care about the sequence. It cares about the dose.
Why Mixing Feels Worse for Some People
If the science says order doesn’t matter, why does mixing drinks seem to cause worse hangovers in real life? The most likely explanation is simple: people who mix drinks tend to drink more total alcohol without realizing it. Switching between beverages makes it harder to track how much you’ve had. A glass of wine and a pint of beer look very different, but each contains roughly the same amount of pure alcohol, about 14 grams. One standard drink in the U.S. is defined as a 12-ounce beer at 5% alcohol or a 5-ounce glass of wine at 12% alcohol. When you alternate between the two, it’s easy to lose count.
There’s also a pacing issue. Beer’s larger volume naturally slows you down. Wine comes in smaller pours that go quickly. If you switch from beer to wine later in the evening, you may drink faster at exactly the point when your judgment about “one more” is already impaired.
Congeners and How They Affect Hangovers
Different alcoholic drinks contain different levels of congeners, which are byproducts of fermentation like acetaldehyde, methanol, and acetone. These compounds contribute to hangover symptoms such as headache and nausea. Dark liquors have the highest concentrations: bourbon contains roughly 37 times the congeners found in vodka. Regular-strength beers fall somewhere in the middle, averaging about 6.8 times the congener content of vodka. Red wine is also relatively high in congeners compared to lighter drinks.
That said, when researchers have controlled for the total amount of alcohol consumed, congener differences between beverages did not account for differences in hangover severity. Congeners can make a hangover slightly worse at the margins, but the dominant factor remains how much alcohol your body has to process overall. Mixing a light beer with a glass of white wine won’t create some unique chemical reaction in your stomach.
What Happens in Your Stomach
One concern people have about mixing drinks is whether it causes extra stomach upset or changes how fast alcohol hits your bloodstream. The alcohol in beer and wine is chemically identical, ethanol. Your stomach doesn’t process “beer alcohol” and “wine alcohol” differently.
What does affect absorption speed is whether you’re drinking on an empty stomach and what else is in the beverage. Drinks with higher sugar content slow gastric emptying. In one study, a sugary mixer delayed stomach emptying by about 15 minutes compared to a diet version, and the diet drink produced a peak blood alcohol level that was roughly 56% higher. This means a sweet wine or a sugar-heavy craft beer might slow absorption slightly, while drier drinks pass through faster. But these are modest effects compared to simply drinking less.
Beer’s larger fluid volume does offer a small hydration advantage. Research comparing the diuretic effects of beer, wine, and spirits found that beer resulted in lower urine concentration (meaning better hydration) compared to wine and spirits, primarily because you take in more total fluid when drinking beer. However, the net diuretic effect of the alcohol itself was similar across all beverage types. Drinking a beer between glasses of wine won’t meaningfully protect you from dehydration.
How to Track Your Intake When Mixing
The practical challenge of mixing wine and beer is keeping an accurate count. Current guidelines from the CDC define moderate drinking as two drinks or fewer per day for men and one drink or fewer per day for women. Each “drink” equals one 12-ounce beer at 5% or one 5-ounce glass of wine at 12%. Those are smaller than what most bars and restaurants actually pour, so it helps to be realistic about serving sizes.
A useful approach is to count in standard drinks rather than glasses. If you have a pint of 7% IPA, that’s closer to 1.4 standard drinks, not one. A generous 8-ounce pour of 14% red wine is more like 1.9 standard drinks. When you’re alternating between beer and wine, mentally logging each as “one drink” can lead you to underestimate by 30% to 50%, depending on the actual ABV and pour size.
Drinking water between alcoholic drinks, eating before and during, and simply paying attention to how intoxicated you feel are more effective strategies than worrying about which type of alcohol you’re combining. The German hangover study confirmed that subjective signs of intoxication, feeling very drunk or getting sick, were the most accurate predictors of next-morning misery. If you feel like you’re overdoing it, you are, regardless of what’s in your glass.