Soon it will be more difficult to get away with referring to your beer as a breakfast replacement in Russia without your boss wondering if it’s affecting your work.

For years, beer has been classified as a food stuff in the country whose drinkers are regularly noted as the heaviest in the world. All of that is about to end with a Kremlin-backed bill that will label the hops-based brew as alcohol.

With the average Russian consuming 32 pints of pure alcohol per capita per year—double the World Health Organization’s recommended maximum—the Russian government has taken a harder line when it comes to alcohol regulation.

“Normalizing the beer production market and classifying it as alcohol is totally the right thing to do and will boost the health of our population,” Yevgeny Bryun, the ministry of health’s chief specialist on alcohol and drug abuse, told the Daily Telegraph.

“We have been talking about and have wanted such a measure for ages. I take my hat off to the parliament.”

The reclassification would restrict when beer can be sold at night and see it banned from shops close to schools. The size of bottles would also be limited to 0.33 litres, reports the Telegraph.

Russia is now the third largest beer market in the world in terms of consumption, beaten by the United States and China, with their beer consumption tripling over the last 15 years.

Sales are aided by the fact that many Russians regard vodka as a real drink and beer as more of a pop in comparison.

The Russian government estimates 500,000 people in the country die from alcohol-related reasons annually, which has prompted President Dmitry Medvedev to call the problem a national disaster.

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