Guide
What Is a Standard Drink?
"I had three glasses" tells you nothing on its own — what was in the glass changes everything. The difference between a shot of tequila and a glass of wine is smaller than you think; the difference between a double rakı and a beer can be larger. The standard drink exists precisely to resolve that confusion.
What is a standard drink?
A standard drink is a unit that converts different alcoholic beverages onto a common scale by looking only at the pure alcohol (ethanol) they contain, regardless of type.
Countries define the unit differently. The World Health Organization and many European countries treat 10 grams of pure alcohol as one standard drink, while the United States uses 14 grams and the United Kingdom uses an 8-gram "unit". Turkey has no single established official definition, so the 10-gram measure is generally used for international comparison.
Promil Tracker does not use this intermediate unit; it takes the volume and alcohol percentage directly and computes pure alcohol in grams. Still, understanding the standard drink concept helps you compare different drinks in your head.
How to calculate pure alcohol
The formula is simple enough to do by hand:
Pure alcohol (grams) = Volume (ml) × ABV (%) ÷ 100 × 0.789
The 0.789 is the density of ethanol in grams per millilitre, needed to convert volume into mass. Take an example: a 500 ml beer at 5% works out to 500 × 0.05 × 0.789 = about 19.7 grams of pure alcohol. Nearly two standard drinks.
Apply the same formula to 60 ml of 45% rakı: 60 × 0.45 × 0.789 = about 21.3 grams. So a medium rakı carries slightly more alcohol than half a litre of beer.
Common serving sizes in Turkey
Below are the servings you encounter most often in Turkey with their approximate pure alcohol content. These assume typical ABVs and will vary by brand.
What stands out is how close very different-looking servings actually are. The gap between a single rakı and a glass of wine is smaller than most people assume.
- Beer, 330 ml bottle (5%): about 13 g pure alcohol
- Beer, 500 ml bottle (5%): about 20 g
- Wine, 150 ml glass (13%): about 15 g
- Champagne, 120 ml flute (12%): about 11 g
- Rakı, single 40 ml (45%): about 14 g
- Rakı, double 80 ml (45%): about 28 g
- Whisky, single 44 ml (40%): about 14 g
- Vodka or tequila, 44 ml shot (40%): about 14 g
- Liqueur, 30 ml (20%): about 5 g
Why cocktails are deceptive
In a cocktail the alcohol hides behind sugar and fruit juice. Because it tastes mild it gets drunk quickly, and how much alcohol you have taken is easy to lose track of.
Many classic cocktails also contain several spirits at once. A Long Island Iced Tea holds vodka, gin, rum, tequila and triple sec — it looks like a single glass, but the total pure alcohol can reach four or five standard drinks. In equal-parts cocktails like a Negroni, the gin and Campari together mean more than 60 ml of high-strength spirit.
This is why Promil Tracker's cocktail feature treats ingredients separately: you can set the amount and brand of each spirit individually and see the real alcohol load without non-alcoholic mixers distorting it.
The same drink has many faces
Even "a beer" is not precise enough. A standard lager sits around 4.5-5%, while craft IPAs reach 7-8% and some specialty beers exceed 10%. A 330 ml bottle of a strong craft beer carries more alcohol than a standard 500 ml lager.
Wine is similar: light whites hover around 11% while warm-climate reds approach 15%. This is why selecting a brand when adding a drink in Promil Tracker automatically sets the correct ABV — and you can still adjust it by hand if you need to.
Frequently Asked Questions
As a rough estimate, a 10-gram standard drink raises BAC by about 0.17‰ in a 70 kg man and about 0.24‰ in a 60 kg woman. These figures shift noticeably with stomach contents and body composition.
Common usage in Turkey is 40 ml for a single, 60 ml for a medium and 80 ml for a double. Larger informal measures also exist, around 120 and 150 ml. Since these vary between venues, treat them as approximate.
For the same amount of pure alcohol the outcome is similar, but stronger drinks are absorbed faster from the stomach and are usually served in smaller volumes, so they tend to be consumed more quickly. In practice that means a faster rise to peak BAC.