Real men drink pints

Don't worry, this is actually about gears, not beer, so bear with us. There's a saying back home, real men drink pints. There's also the somewhat sexist corollary, women can only drink half (pints). As such, the TA has even heard of a woman ordering a pint of beer in Scotland and being served said pint as two halves. Honestly.

Interestingly, this doesn't carry through when dealing with the insanely-strengthened Belgian beers so beloved by cyclocrossers. One wonders if this pintism isn't so much volume apartheid as it is alcohol apartheid. If regular beer is ca. 4% alcohol by volume (v/v), then a pint (ca. 500 mL) has about 20 mL of pure ethanol, whereas a 300 mL bottle of Duvel (8.5% ethanol v/v) has 25.5 mL of ethanol. What would happen to "men pints/ladies halves" thinking if Tetleys had the same alcohol content as Duvel we have no idea but we know we wouldn't go down Leeds City centre on a Saturday night! But we digress. Too much Hoegaarden perhaps; only 4.9% but the TA has always been a bit of a lightweight. We must have the dodgy ADH gene.

Anyway. Gears. This beer thing sounds frankly ridiculous doesn't it? But you'd be surprised how many people ask for a lower granny gear on their bikes, but when told to get a compact crank (50 Tooth and 34T chain-rings) instead of a racing double (53T/39T) the reaction is "but compacts are a girls' gear".

Really?

Continued on the TurnAround at trins.ca