Is it time our obsession with the pint was knocked on the head?

Picture the scene: it’s a balmy summer’s day, you’re holidaying in a small village somewhere in continental Europe, and your partner has just taken your child to the playground. You’re all alone – what do you do next?

For me, the answer is simple: find a little bar or taverna, pull up a chair, get out your book and order a nice, cold beer. You know the sort – light, fresh and screaming: “Drink me while eating some plain, salty crisps from a little bowl, and all will be well”. It’s total thirst-quenching perfection.

And the thing I love so much about these moments is that it’s never a massive pint that arrives: it’s always equivalent to somewhere between an imperial 568.261ml, and a half-pint – 330ml of liquid refreshment.

Yet we are obsessed in this country with pints. It feels like sacrilege to write that I don’t enjoy them – all that gassy liquid swilling around your innards – and I don’t understand why we’re so precious about protecting it as a “pour size”. Though it’s been a common unit of measurement since the 14th century, its ever-changing volume was only formalised with the Imperial Weights and Measures Act of 1824.

But with the pint celebrating its bicentenary this year, perhaps it’s about time we embraced its cooler sibling, the two-thirds pint, a measure that’s only been kicking around officially and legally since 2011, but whose time has definitely come.

Research published by Cambridge academics has shown that switching from pints to two-thirds of a pint could benefit consumers’ health, due to the obvious fact they’re drinking less.

A study led by Professor Dame Theresa Marteau found that when two-third pints were poured instead of pints, beer consumption dropped by 10 per cent over a four-week period. The actual number of times that people went to the bar didn’t change: “We tend to consume in units of one, so ‘I’ll have one glass of wine’, ‘one glass of beer’, ‘one slice of cake’, and so on. So if you make those a little bit smaller, people end up on average consuming slightly less.”

As a nation, we believe that more is better. But if we’re going to lead longer, happier lives, we could start by adjusting the amount we sink in the pub on a Friday night. I don’t think you can accuse the Spanish or Italians of having less fun than us because their pour sizes are smaller.

It’s an embarrassment to me that we have one of the largest standard pour sizes in the world. The standard beer in the US is 473ml, the size of a standard beer bottle.

Order “une bière” in France, and you’ll get 330ml – unless you specify “un demi” or “une chope” (250ml) or, for a wine-glass sized 150ml, “un galopin”. Demand “une pinte” and everyone in the bar will know you come from across la Manche.

Even in Germany, land of Oktoberfest, the average-sized beer is 500ml – less than a pint – and you order it by the large glass ("ein großes Bier", 500ml) or the small ("ein kleines Bier", 300ml). For a full Bavarian litre, don’t ask for a stein – order "eine Maß”.

To ensure their beverage stays cold, Spaniards order multiple small beers rather than one large one – with “una caña” (200ml) the standard-bearer at most bars. Or try a doble (typically double the size of a caña) or a 330ml tubo.

In saying this, I realise there’s a marketing issue for the ⅔ pint (or should that be the pint-ette?). “I’ll have a two-thirds of a pint” doesn’t have a neat ring. So how about co-opting the Aussie term “schooner”? For almost a century, our Antipodean relos have been serving a three-quarter pint, but, at 425ml, it’s a good glug larger than a ⅔-er and would cause confusion at your local Walkabout.

If pubs and bars are ever to offer a two-third pint more widely – and we found an easy way to order them – you might just find that it becomes our most popular pub measure. And then we’d reach a pint of no return.