Recently, I was drinking with a (Russian) friend who commented that I'm the only one he struggles to keep up with while drinking and that he goes home blackout

Recently, I was drinking with a (Russian) friend who commented that I'm the only one he struggles to keep up with while drinking and that he goes home blackout drunk every time we hang out. We don't drink that much, and decided maybe we're just getting old. We both noted how we used to drink a lot more, meaning we're just as cool and fashionable as The Kids These Days, who are according to several news reports drinking less than college kids were a decade or so ago. A few days later, he said he figured it out: for each of the ~3-4% ABV beers I drink, he's drinking a ~7-8% IPA. Him "catching up" (round for round/pint for pint) was consuming twice the alcohol as I was. I said I'd noticed that myself, when moving to a major city where most beers were $8 IPAs - having a couple beers at lunch would make me tired, if not drunk, and I'd need a cup of coffee on the way back to get going again. I'm too lazy to do The Math, but I can't help but wonder how the "Kids These Days Drink Less Alcohol" charts line up with the "Kids These Days Seem To Prefer IPAs" chart. (It seems ABV has little to do with the historical trend presented here, though) > Wine is taken to be 0.12 alcohol, the same number is used in modern estimates of alcohol consumption. The amount of alcohol consumed by drinking historical beer brews is between 0.62 to 0.107, the % of alcohol in “small beer” is taken to be around 0.05 and the % in “strong beer” is taken to be around 0.135, the relative consumption of small and strong beer is depended on whether we use the numbers from “Vandelint 1734” or the estimates in the studies mentioned in table 2.1 in “Alcohol, Sex, and Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe”