roadrunnertwice: Rodney the Second Grade T-Ball Jockey displays helpful infographics. (T-ball / Your Ass (Buttercup Festival))
[personal profile] roadrunnertwice

Ok, you should probably check my math on this before using it for anything important, because I definitely got confused and had to backtrack a couple times, BUT:

  • The density of ethanol at room temp is about 0.789 g/ml.
  • From this anecdotal analysis (measurement is likely fine, but it looks like a small and arbitrary set of samples), it looks fairly common for unfermented fruit juices to have an ethanol content of around (50 to 80 mg ethanol)/(1 dl of juice), or .05-.08g/100ml.
  • The unit of blood alcohol content (BAC) in the United States defines "1%" as being (1 g ethanol)/(1 dl of blood), or 1g/100ml.

So if we use the density to convert those units to the usual unit for beverages, which is % alcohol by volume (ABV), we get:

  • Fruit juice: (.05/.789)/100 = 0.000633714 and (.08/.789)/100 = 0.001013942, or around 0.063% to 0.101% ABV.
  • Blood of a person just above the legal limit of intoxication (.08% BAC) in the US: (.08/.789)/100 = 0.001013942, or 0.101% ABV.

So, unless vampires are hypersensitive to ethanol (which frankly seems maladaptive in an obligate anthropophage; I could maybe see it if you're diurnal, but a LOT of humans are probably fucked up during prime night-stalking hours), the blood of a mildly intoxicated person would have about as strong an effect as commercial orange juice.

To get up to an ABV of 0.5% (which is the limit for beverages like kombucha to dodge being regulated as alcohol, which turns out to be a whole fuckin' thing), you'd need the blood of a person at 0.39% BAC, which is... a notable achievement, let's say. Wikipedia's (probably not comprehensive) list of the highest recorded BACs hovers somewhere around 1.5%, which comes to about 1.9% ABV, and I think 2.0% or 2.5% is the lowest ABV I've seen in a normal beer (not counting non-alcoholic beers, which go through a low-pressure low-heat evaporation process or something to distill most of the ethanol out, and also I feel like I remember Brewdog did a stunt beer called "Nanny State" that somehow managed to crack the 2.0 barrier without distilling, but that's pretty abnormal). To get up to 3.5% "Utah beer" levels, such that a vampire could get a respectable buzz by pounding a six-pack of your blood, you'd need to somehow reach a 2.76% BAC.