How Strong Is That Beer? Google Might Know

You can use Google to do some cool and often very useful things besides just searching for websites. For example, you can find out what the weather is like, define a word, and do math calculations.

I may be a little late to this party, but now Google is apparently working on pairing beer with another item I love - tech.

Ever wondered what a beer's ABV was, but didn't have a quick way to find out? Try entering "[beer name here] abv" in Google's search bar and see what happens. (Substitute the actual name in place of [beer name here]. You can leave out the brackets and quotes as well.)

Right now, it appears not many work. Personally, I tried 30 different beers ranging from small breweries, big breweries, popular brands, limited releases, seasonals, and year-round offerings and the only two I could get to work were 60 minute ipa abv and stone ipa abv.

Oddly, zombie dust abv, which was the original example search of the user on Reddit who posted this nifty trick, no longer works. Another attempt that evidently did work at one time, but does not now, was 90 minute ipa abv. As another user noted, ommegang abbey ale abv and some of the other Ommegang brews worked then and continue to do so now. While not terribly effective at the moment, who knows where Google might end up going with this.

Yet another Reddit user in the above thread echoed my typical method for quickly searching out beer information. Just type in the name of the beer you're looking for, followed by "ba" or "rb" depending on if you prefer beeradvocate.com (ba) or ratebeer.com (rb), and you almost always receive a link to that beer on those websites right at the top of your results. hopslam ba, for example. This also has the added benefit of providing info beyond just the ABV.

So, has anyone else ran across this Google experiment? Leave your own findings of results that have worked in the comments!