How long after you drink alcohol will it show up on a urine test?!
How long after you drink alcohol will it show up on a urine test?
Answers:
It depends on how sensitive the test is, how much other liquid you've been consuming, and how much alcohol you've had.
If your kidneys process the alcohol at noon, and you don't take a pee until 4 PM, obviously there is going to be alcohol in your bladder all that time. It's impossible to empty your bladder completely, so some of the alcohol contaminates the next batch of urine.
Your kidneys don't remove *all* the alcohol in your blood. The more in your blood, the more it removes. If you have two shots of whiskey at noon, half the alcohol will be gone from your blood stream at 1 PM, but part of that alcohol has been processed by the kidneys, and part of the alcohol is absorbed by your fat tissues. When your blood alcohol level drops, alcohol comes out of the fat tissues and back into the bloodstream. Thus, there will still be low but detectable alcohol in your bloodstream at midnight.
By noon the next day, the level in your bloodstream will be very low, and if you've been flushing your bladder often, the level in your bladder will be very low as well.
Zero? No. But it'd take a really sophisticated test to determine that the alcohol came from whiskey, rather than another source. You're aware that your body makes a certain amount of ethanol? That's why the donut pile at AA meetings disappears so rapidly. The body turns that sugar into alcohol, which eases the physical discomfort that alcoholics have when in withdrawal.