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Only one thing lowers your blood alcohol, and it isn't coffee. Here's the rate your liver actually works at — and why the answer is never a green light.
Last updated: July 2026
Before anything else. This page explains how alcohol leaves your body. It is not a driving clearance, and neither is any app. Impairment — reaction time, judgement, night vision — outlasts the number. Never drive after drinking, whatever any estimate says.
Your liver clears alcohol at a roughly steady rate of about 0.015 % per hour (0.015 g/dL), typically somewhere between 0.010 and 0.025 depending on the person. That rate is the whole story. Nothing you can do in the moment meaningfully changes it.
The useful mental model: alcohol arrives quickly and leaves slowly. A drink is absorbed over roughly 30–90 minutes. Clearing it takes hours. That asymmetry is why a night can get away from you — you can add faster than you subtract.
Most things your body clears follow first-order kinetics: the more there is, the faster it goes. Alcohol is different. Above very low concentrations the enzyme that breaks it down is fully saturated, so it works flat out at a fixed pace no matter how much is queued behind it — zero-order kinetics.
The practical consequence is unforgiving. Twice as much alcohol takes roughly twice as long to clear, not the same time. There is no "burning it off faster because there's more of it."
Say a night peaks at 0.09 %. At 0.015 % per hour:
| Hours after the peak | Approximate BAC |
|---|---|
| 0 | 0.09 % |
| 2 | 0.06 % |
| 4 | 0.03 % |
| 6 | 0.00 % |
Six hours from the peak — and the peak itself lands well after the last drink, because that drink still has to finish absorbing. A night that ends at 1 a.m. can easily reach zero closer to 7 a.m. than to 3 a.m.
These are the persistent myths, and the reason they matter is that each one makes you feel better without making you be better:
The one thing that genuinely changes the shape of the curve is food eaten before or while you drink. It slows absorption, so the peak is lower and later. It does not speed up the clearing.
Two people drinking identically will not land on the same curve. The main reasons:
This is what a real model accounts for — see how blood alcohol is actually estimated for the formula and its limits.
Not permission. What a projected sober time is genuinely useful for is seeing the shape of the night while it's still happening — noticing that you're climbing faster than you meant to, that the next drink pushes the finish line past the morning, that last Friday looked exactly like this one.
That is the difference between a number that tells you what you may do and a number that shows you what you're doing.
No. None change how fast your liver clears alcohol. Coffee and cold water make you feel alert while your blood alcohol is unchanged — worse, not better, because the impairment is hidden rather than removed. Food before or during drinking lowers the peak by slowing absorption, but does nothing to speed elimination.
Roughly 0.015 % per hour for most people, with a typical range of about 0.010–0.025. It's close to a constant rate, so twice the alcohol takes roughly twice the time.
No — and don't trust one that claims to. An estimate is a model, not a measurement, and impairment persists below any legal threshold. Never drive after drinking.
It passes the time elimination needs but doesn't accelerate it. Going to bed at a high level means waking up still above zero.
SipWiser logs each sip and draws the line as it happens — with a projected time back to 0.00 on your phone, lock screen and watch. Free, offline-first, and built to help you drink less, never more.
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