It's a Saturday and I have to work into the early hours tonight. I always like a beer at the weekend (and a good laugh at Kate Bush trying to dance on her Wuthering Heights video - it cheers me up as I try and work). So, my question is, how many beers do you think one can drink before work...erm...stops? Would 2 cans of Carling be okay, do you reckon? Or am a gambling with my future. Perhaps a silly question, but with serious intentions. I've done a poll below for you to select the number you think I would be okay to drink.

Where's the option for three? Spread over a long time (i.e. a beer an hour+) it doesn't have a significant effect.

I think a lot depends on what the work is - if it is *hard* work then you probably shouldn't have any.  But I reckon you can have a drink while doing some easier stuff. And if you are sorting references, filing etc then a drink is compulsory.

PS not all of us drink beer - my preferred tipple (being consumed now) is dry white wine

Thanks Jepsonclough and Slizor. I'll just buy 2 from the good people of my local Spar and see how I get off with them. Dry white wine, Jepsonclough? That's a bit too sophisticated for my palette. Having said that, I have been known to be partial to the odd tipple of Blue Nun in my rock star days.

Apologies for the typo. Get off with 2 cans of Carling? Get on with drinking them I meant. Now that was an interesting Freudian slip :$

Good call Wally, my choice this evening is a liqueur coffee, no work done yet but it does taste nice.
I have a video somewhere of almost my entire extended family (about 25 people aged 10 to 80) singing and miming along to that Kate Bush song - it's terrifying yet hilarious viewing. Includes a particularly touching duet between my sister and uncle, and some awesome "drawing windows in the air" work by my mother.

@ Wally - not sophisticated - more the result of my being middle aged (with a previous life as an accountant earning high salary) - when I was an undergrad it was pints of lager (1664 always seemed to be on offer in the union) and had I done my PhD then (instead of waiting more than 20 years) I probably would have carried on with larger.

I'll give another vote to the white wine choice; perhaps this is more of a "how many units" thread than a "how many beers"? Irrespective of this, I'd like to propose that performance can improve with the addition of a unit or two...loosening up the grey matter for a bit of free writing. Plus generally getting past the stress of a stressful day.

I agree with the point about drinking slowly over time - necking three pints of snakebite in half an hour would probably undermine my above proposal...

I'm going back to my glass of white...

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And, without wishing to sound incredibly dull...why do the surveys here not have an n value??? Hmmm?!

(An observation which I managed after 1 and a half glasses of said plonk...)

Edit: added 'not' to the first statement...which changes the whole meaning, and suggests that the alcohol-productivity hypothesis requires the addition of the enforced-next-day-edit-function. Oops!

I agree that a bit of alcohol can loosen the old grey matter. I never write after a bevvy though, I did it once and my writing was Reeeeaaaalllly good, my supervisor even read that bit out loud and goes 'now I lllliiiiiike that!' so I see it as a potentially dangerous and slippery path for me; instead, I try to replicate the drunken mentality without chemical intervention.


Teek, I love the family Bush moment! Do we all love Kate Bush here? I imagine that I am Kate Bush quite frequently. I think given the right nurture as a teen and the right breaks I would have been Kate Bush; I get this feeling particularly strongly during dance classes and afetr a bevvy or two, so I can relate to the clan celeration.

I just went to an amazing classical concert tonight, this top violinist doing beethoven and this teen prodige who's composed an entirely new latin american tango inspired piece. It was fantastic, such mazingly beautiful sounds.