In Utah, any alcoholic beverage over 3.2% alcohol is sold only in
state-run liquor stores. That means that the only place you can buy most
import beers, and many of the better US beers, is in these stores.
(They also cost around $1.60 to $2.80 per 12-oz bottle.)
Of course, hard liquor and wine is all hard metric, but beers are not. The
store shelf labels list the contents in both ounces and milliliters. I
went to pick up a couple of beers and found this total mess.
Local microbrew
bottle label: 12 oz
shelf label: 12 oz/ 355 mL
(ok)
Czech (Black Lion)
bottle label: 1 pint .9 oz
shelf label: 16.9 oz/550 mL
(should be 500 mL)
Australian (Fosters)
bottle label: 25.4 oz (1 pint 9.4 fl oz)
shelf label: 25.4 oz / 750 mL
(ok)
German (Spaten Munich)
bottle label: 1 pt .9 oz
shelf label: 17 oz / 500 mL
(should be 16.9 oz)
English (Bodingtons)
bottle label: 1 pint
shelf label: 16 oz / 491 mL
(should be 473 mL for US fl oz)
(or 455 mL for imperial fl oz)
(I got the conversion factor for imperial ounces from
http://home.clara.net/brianp/conversion.html, but there is something
wrong, as it says an imperial pint is 568 mL. Are there 16 ounces to a
pint in the imperial system?)
In any case, a real mess. I am not too surprised that Utah can't get the
conversions right, but it's crazy that foreign beers use this "1 pt .9 oz"
rather than just 500 mL.
Jim Elwell
