why is the alcohol content of most beers around 4%? how would you determine if you were correct?

Question

how would you test this hypothesis?

Answer 1

Alcohol is it's own molecule - it is liquid but can be frozen into solid or evaporated into gas. When you say a drink has 4% alcohol, you litterally mean that 4/100ths or 1/25 of each particle in the drink is an alcohol particle.

A way to test this - if you really need to test your hypothesis - is to take a determined mass of alcoholic beverage (beer works) and heat it up a small degree. Alcohol is less dense and evaporates at a much lower temperature than water, so you could heat up the solution a small bit so that the water does not evaporate at much of an accelerated state, while the alcohol would evaporate at nearly maximum rate -- essentially letting all the alcohol molecules float right out the solution.

Then take the final mass of your solution and figure out the difference from the starting mass. The difference is how much alcohol was burned up, so a change in % is the % of alcohol that was in the solution.

There are much much more effective and reliable ways to take the measure of this - but I don't have any of them off the top of my head. If you're really interested, I'm sure you can find an answer in a chemistry book!

Answer 2

Beers with that content tend to taste more appealing to the majority of American beer drinkers - simple as that. Although most common is roughly 4%, alcohol content, flavor and aroma and carbonation level is completely controlled by the brewer and his own unique recipe.
There is a "gravity" test to determine alcohol content, however, you can obtain an alcohol content listing for many many beers right online.

Answer 3

Drink 25 beers, and then if you were 100% drunk you would know.