[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by Everyneurotic

you guys are snobs, all booze gets you wasted, it depends how much you want to spend on it and how much quality and flavor you want from it and all these factors are hardly dependent or proportionated to each other.

lies! foul lies!

alcohol is alcohol, but alcohol is not the only byproduct of fermentation. you're talking about fruits and grains and sugars of various kinds that are fermented by variety upon variety of yeasts. that's why different alcohols will fuck you up differently, and everything tastes different.

take champagne, the more obvious-- the 2nd fermentation produces aldehydes, and hunderds of other compounds, which are why champagne gets to your head so quickly-- quicker than wine.

my dad always indoctrinated me with this mantra: grain with grain, fruit with fruit, but never mix. meaning you can drink together different grain alcohols (like beer and scotch), or fruit alcohols (wine and brandy), but if you mix you're going to give yourself a headache.

while it's a rough rule of thumb, it works. it's not the alcohol itself but the hundreds of other compounds form the fermentation. what makes one beer taste different from the other has to go through your liver too.

also the sugar content is important-- sweet/sugary drinks like say a black sambucca or sweet vermouth will get you drunk faster. this is because, roughly speaking, you metabolize alcohol into sugar, and if you're all sugared up you block that metabolic path which means the alcohol has more time to kill your braincells. true story.

beyond that-- cheapass alcohol with bad fermentation processes can contain methyl alcohol-- which is metabolized into formic acid (think ants, bees & wasp stings) and can cause nerve damage (it tends to show a preference for the optic nerve) & other beatitudes. sometimes in real ratty countries producers will even spike their product with it. oh, ive had experiences with some real cheap "wine".

anyway, the liver is the only organ that can grow again when you chop it off, but you still have to be kind to it. for that reason, if im planning to get plastered i'll secure a bottle of scotch and drink from it all night. scoth has the cleanest drunkenness of the lot, i think.