I feel like it would be useful to know exactly how much alcohol is in a can or a bottle. Also why is alcohol the only thing measured in percentages and not sugar or caffeine or medicine?
I feel like it would be useful to know exactly how much alcohol is in a can or a bottle. Also why is alcohol the only thing measured in percentages and not sugar or caffeine or medicine?
Like I said, because the percent doesn’t change with the volume served. If you are an 1800s brewer you can calculate the ABV from samples, and subsequently sell kegs of various sizes, bottles, which in turn can be served in various amounts and the percent doesn’t change. And the industry never changed, nor the laws written. So it’s the way it is because that is how they used to do it and how laws were written and there hadn’t been a motivation for people to change that.
In a word - tradition.
Yup.
We do lots of things as a society because we’ve always done them that way, or it’s good enough, and not enough reason to go through the effort of changing everything including legal language, etc.
Happily, in this case I think ABV is about the best way we could have inherited, maybe only second to alcohol by weight in terms of consistency across temperature.
Also, it’s practical. If you know something is twice as concentrated (12% instead of 6%) you know to drink it more carefully, rather than if you get a jug of something and it just says how much alcohol is in there, then you have to mentally calibrate how strong it is by considering the volume of the jug vs. how much alcohol there is.