jmcquown wrote:

> Bob Pastorio wrote:
>
>>This was posted on another newsgroup today.
>><<<<<<<<<<<< begin quote >>>>>>>>>>>>
>>
>>Shape Of Beverage Glass Influences How Much People Pour And Drink
>>
>> Champaign, Ill. -- Your eyes play tricks. And your brain makes it
>>worse. Both teenagers and adults misjudge how much they pour into
>>glasses. They will pour more into short wide glasses than into tall
>>slender glasses, but perceive the opposite to be true.
>
> (snip)
>
> Forget about child psychological studies. That has very little to do with
> serving alcohol with measured pourers. Given a tall cold glass of milk
> containing 8 oz. or a short one containing 6 oz. I'll take the 8 oz. over
> the 6 oz. every time. Why? I like milk. It's my beverage of choice
> outside of iced water.

Um, Jill this is supremely irrelevant to what was being noted in the
article. It wasn't about child studies. It was about estimation, not
how much milk you like to drink when you know how much is in the
glass. Perhaps read the whole thing.

> Anyone who has ever been a bartender (as I have) knows it is not the size or
> shape of the glass, whether it is neat or on the rocks. For a shot of
> liquor; you count the pour. One one thousand. Stop. For a double shot,
> one one thousand, two one thousand. Stop. Kinda like waiting for lightning
> after you hear the thunder.

Right. But the people who did the study measured the results of
bartenders just like yourself and demonstrated rather conclusively
that you are unreliable judges of quantity. They even put the numbers
in the piece. You might want to read them.

Jill, Southern Comfort pours slower than vodka because the viscosity
is greater. A full bottle will pour "harder" than a low one because of
the weight of liquid bearing on the mouth of the bottle. Counting
assumes that all spouts will pour the same way, that the liquids will
leave the spout at the same rate and that your count will be constant.
None of these will be the case.

Liqueurs (and anything with any amount of sugar in it) build up sugar
in pourers and gradually close the hole down. Dirty pourers pour
slower. How the bartender moves while pouring will change the size of
the pour (slowly bring the bottle up to a 45-degree angle versus
quickly bring it completely upside down).

In one resort operation I ran, we had more than 50 bartenders. Not
one, not one could pour a constant ounce into 6 glasses of different
shapes. Not one. These weren't rookies. In actual tests at the bar,
not one could consistently pour a fixed amount. Did the same thing in
every bar I owned or operated. Not one could consistently pour a fixed
amount. Some counted, some estimated, some flat out guessed. A few
clever ones poured out measured amounts as reference points and then
proceeded to pour differently anyway, sometimes more, sometimes less.

The place where the greatest failure occurred was in pouring into
shakers for frothy drinks. Collinses and the like. Different drink
recipes call for different amounts of the booze. Some mixed drinks
call for fractions of an ounce or multiples of an ounce. The test was
to pour a total of 5 ounces of different things into a shaker and pour
that into a glass. Almost everybody poured short. Customers would have
gotten less than they were paying for. Bartenders count on the froth
to cover the difference.

One very interesting test we did was to put the pourers from different
manufacturers on bottles and see how they each performed. We filled
the bottles with 750 ml of tap water, turned them up to full upside
down and timed them to full empty. There was a 13-second spread
between the slowest and the fastest. Plastic ones poured faster than
metal. The ones made in China (those bright red ones you see in so
many bars) were the most inconsistent. Different pourers from the same
box poured at different rates.

> The only reason my employers in restaurants or bars ever thought to use
> automatic shot pourers was to prevent a bartender from over-pouring for
> preferred customers who would tip them better for extra liquor at the same
> price as for less liquor (or their friends who hang out and mooch). Liquor
> is expensive and bartenders handing out triple shots to friends for the
> price of a single eats into the profits. Some of those shot pours actually
> count the shots so the owner can sum up what has occurred during the night.
> But! they can't tell who did it or for whom.

You need to get acquainted with the newer equipment and newer
foodservice economic theory available before making sweeping
statements like this.

When my operations were doing $10K to $15K a day in alcohol sales, a
fraction of an ounce in each glass meant a huge difference in total
usage. And a few friends weren't going to affect the numbers enough to
even notice. When there are people 6 or 8 deep around the bar with a
big room full of as well, and a dozen people pouring, the whole issue
of tips and friends become meaningless. We're talking many hundreds of
gallons of booze a week and tens of thousands of drinks. In some
neighborhood bar or small restaurant that pours a few hundred dollars
a day, that's one thing. But in operations like mine, it's a few
orders of magnitude different.

Since our food sales generated a grand total of 2% to 3% profit,
alcohol sales had to carry the operation. This isn't uncommon in
resort foodservice. We poured heavy (our single shot in a mixed drink
was 1 3/4 ounces) and monitored it stringently. We could still do
happy hour sales and we could still change the pour size with a few
pokes at a keyboard for special events and special occasions. We
absolutely couldn't give alcohol away by state law and they're very
fussy about that. Since we were doing so much business, there were
undercover state inspectors around very, very often. We played no
games with the ABC board. The only way we could do anything like that
is to actually buy a drink for the customer and the inspectors liked
to assume the worst and would hassle us about it. The rule back then
was that a *person* had to buy the drink; the house couldn't.

Measured pouring made sure the umbrella drinks always tasted the same.
Same for martinis and other drinks of the sort. All mixed and rocks
and neat drinks always looked and tasted the same. And made sure that
people would be able to gauge their capacities better. And made sure
that we could keep better tabs on the heavy drinkers and deal with any
issues before they became problems.

> I suppose this study was paid for by some government funding. Gee, what a
> surprise

Good cheap shot at the end, there, Jill. Sorry you didn't grasp the
real implications it held. I thought it was cool that the dateline was
from Champaign, Illinois. Not champagne, but close enough.

POP! fizzzzzzzz

Pastorio