how much alcohol is in a bottle of vodka

[ElijahFitz]

Ah, the age-old question. To get straight to the point, your typical bottle of vodka is a pretty spirited character, usually containing 40% alcohol by volume (ABV). In the United States, this is also known as being 80-proof, a term that sounds much more impressive at a party. This means that in a standard 750ml bottle, 300ml is pure alcohol, and the rest is water.

But let's be honest, "40% of the liquid" isn't a very helpful answer when you're trying to figure out how many friends you can invite over. For a more practical measure, we can look at it in terms of "standard drinks," a concept helpfully defined by government bodies like the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

A standard drink of a distilled spirit like vodka is considered to be 1.5 fluid ounces, which is the amount you'd get in a typical shot glass. When you do the math, a common 750ml bottle of vodka holds about 17 of these standard 1.5-ounce shots. So, depending on your mixology ambitions, that's enough for about 17 vodka tonics, 17 Moscow Mules, or at least a few very, very strong martinis.