Get more booze for your buck with these magic words

Is it too early to start the weekend? Whenever you belly up to the bar next, remember this key phrase: "In a tumbler." It's not a secret bartender code that will get you a bottle of Cristal on the house, but ordering your drink in a shorter, wider glass will get you a more generous pour.

Here's why: according to researchers at Georgia Tech and Cornell, when people judge volume, they pay attention to how tall things are, but don't compensate for width. In their study, they asked both bartenders and college students to pour one shot (1.5 oz) into glasses of different sizes. The researchers found that even the experienced bartenders overpoured by 20.5 percent when they they were serving in short, wide glasses than when they were serving in taller, narrower ones. Among college students and inexperienced bartenders (kind of the same thing, come to think of it), the difference was even more pronounced.

Of course, the researchers didn't set out to study what I fondly refer to as value drinking. They were studying overconsumption, the cues in our environment that make us eat, or in this case, drink too much. For them, manipulating these cues — say, getting a child to drink more milk by pouring it in a shorter, wider glass — can be a key to healthier living. But Koert van Ittersum, an assistant professor of marketing at Georgia Tech and one of the authors of the study, acknowledged that by ordering my martini (gin, extra olives) in a tumbler, I was probably getting stiffer drinks: "I'm sure of it," he told me. Cheers!