Just a warning to everyone: This effect doesn't seem to have much scientific support beyond the cited paper. Other work has followed up and was not able to replicate: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8603706/.
The test is trivial - take a breathalyzer and compare results after say 2, 3, 5 beers before and after. Some mental / IQ test could be added to make sure we don't have folks driving around passing breath test while being very drunk.
Something tells me if they can't provide such a trivial result, it ain't working as folks expect (and god knows what nasty side effects it can have).
a hangover isn't strictly correlated to alcohol - you can have a hangover with a 0% alcohol reported by the breathalyzer. I've read drinking alcohol starts processes that damage the brain for the following 3 weeks, and the brain needs additional 3 weeks to heal. Obviously what people mean by a hangover has a much shorter span, I think mostly related to dehydration.
I said it eliminates the most unpleasant ones, leaving the less unpleasant or neutral ones. I did meet a woman once who never got hangovers but instead a mild euphoric high, almost certainly some unusual GABA related brain chemistry.
For the rest of us though, what’s left over is a mild lethargic unfocused feeling, no headaches or nausea just a strong need not to be bothered and lay around all morning.
Great suggestion. There is also Kislip, which seems to be based on probiotics and, like DHM, also helps metabolize acetaldehyde. Acetium (a Finnish product) also claims to lower acetaldehyde, but that might be a localized effect (mouth/nasopharynx + GI tract).
I'm not sure how that's helpful. It looks like ALDH is responsible for breaking down acetaldehyde. However, the pathway for ethanol to become acetaldehyde happens primarily in the liver with ADH. So while this may flood your stomach with ALDH, that's mainly only useful in the blood stream after alcohol is metabolized right?
Is the theory here that because the digestive tracks is a large organs filled with blood the resulting ALDH would interact?
My next question is do these, and how many, probiotic bacteria survive the acid wash of the stomach?
What we really need is something that helps quickly break down acetaldehyde, which is what alcohol is broken down to in your bloodstream and is responsible for all the negative side effects.
Check out a product named ZBiotics [1] which claims to do this. I can't tell you that it for certain works as advertised, but between myself and several other people now in my friend group, all but one swears by the results in terms of the morning after.
Perhaps? Out of the various things I've tried this is the one that has seemed to have the best effect. I've not done a double blind or anything so can't say that it's not psychosomatic.
As for the expense, I just view it adding a beer to the night. At least where I am beers are generally ~$9 a pop (more once you add tip & tax) so it's about the same. And to be honest, the productivity gain from the next morning not being so rough has generally been worth it.
Brussel sprouts are quite good these days, because they've been genetically engineered over the past 30 years to be less bitter. They're not your parents' sprouts anymore (especially roasted for that Maillard reaction, not boiled as they would've likely done).
Are you working for Big Sprout? I seem to remember seeing that exact phrase on here in the last couple of months.
"Not your parents sprouts anymore"
For the record I loved them 30 years ago and still love em.
My recipe is very different to the modern fashion, boiled until mushy with a slice of smokey bacon, drain and eat with butter. They literally melt like butter - delicious.
Brussel sprouts at restaurants are basically candy lol. Yeah they're roasted and crispy and cooked with bacon fat and usually some sweet sauce added lol.
What about all the other negative impacts though - like liver impact and blood pressure. Isn’t it better to just moderate your drinking rather than drinking to excess and then dialing back the feel of it with broccoli?
Of all the negatives, I think diminished sleep is the one that doesn’t get enough attention.
It’s superficial sleep at best. You’re up peeing 3,4,5 times a night. You never enter REM sleep. You’re dragging the entire next day. All to do it over again to your body the next day?
Of the people that I know that drink actively almost every day, they look like shit, and lack motivation.
Their body is crying out for rest and better food but they just keep drinking through their signals.
> It’s superficial sleep at best. You’re up peeing 3,4,5 times a night. You never enter REM sleep. You’re dragging the entire next day. All to do it over again to your body the next day? (...) look like shit, and lack motivation.
Agreed, not seeing many good use cases. It could be prescribed to alcoholics who can’t/won’t stop drinking to help them taper off alcohol, but people would just end up drinking more to counter it.
The best use I can think of is for undercover agents to drink heavily and avoid intoxication!
As long as it doesn't leave your palet with a taste of the gel, the point is to enjoy the taste of these drinks without the effects of alcohol. Not everybody drink alcohol for the alteration effects and the non-alcohol versions of most beverages is so shitty you don't really want them.
My mother for example hate the feeling of being intoxicated, even a little. So she only drink one glass on occasions and barely finishes it. She would definitely enjoy it more if she could have different wines over the course of a meal. It would also be useful if you want to enjoy the taste of some drinks with alcohol but you need to drive or you are in an on-call schedule.
Useful too for sales people at business dinners, execs doing corporate entertainment, journalists, even politicians - anyone who's employment requires them to engage in quasi-social activities with 3rd parties where it's awkward to refuse a drink or six.
Turmeric-based drinks we can find here in Japan are said to work miracles against hangover. I rarely drink alcohol, so I can't tell whether that's true.
Unlikely. The alleged medical benefits of turmeric are largely illusory; the only medically interesting property that it's been conclusively shown to have is that it interferes with a wide range of biochemical assays.
> Something to sober you up if you're already drunk would be amazing ...
But it's the fun of alcohol!
What'd be amazing would be something that really works against the headaches and/or prevent vomiting. Basically something for the next day or even the next two days (when you get old, if you party too hard it can take two days to feel good again: I hate it so at 50 I very rarely party hard anymore: maybe once a year).
Hangovers are a good part caused by by the body reacting to the "damage" that alcohol does:
- Alcohol loosens the blood vessels, whereas a lot of the effects of a hangover are caused by the body then "over-constricting" when the aclohol goes away, causing headaches and nausea. The cause of the headache is similar for a brain-freeze from too much ice cream causing the veins in your neck and throat to constrict, though the brain-freeze goes away as you warm back up.
- There's also the dehydration as alcohol throws off the balance of water in your system as it makes you want to pee more, but interferes with the body's ability to actually absorb water.
- Alcohol causes your body to pump out more "feel good" hormones, which then lead to a crash later.
So the way to prevent a hangover is to not get drunk in the first place, same as always. If you want to drink and limit the effects of alcohol (including the initial "benefits") then this has potential. It may prevent vomiting in the sense that vomiting is your body trying to eject the poison as it's building up faster than it can process it (eg when you're already trashed an on the train to hangoverville).
However, people often tend to drink for the "good" effects that this gel prevents. If what you want is alcohol's fun, then you're going to need another cure (essentially an IV drip, and drugs to replace the hormones and loosen your blood vessels - all of which are not readily available for other good reasons).
A reliable way to prevent hangovers in my experience is to simply pace yourself properly as well as eat and drink plenty of water.
People go out partying on near-empty stomachs and take crazy amounts of alcoholic drinks with not so much as a drop of water all night; it's no surprise that their bodies react that extremely.
Also, sticking to drinks with low levels of congeners helps immensely. Ethanol is already toxic enough without throwing other more dangerous alcohols into the mix.
I wonder if there's scientific consensus on how much water is "plenty". Like, what's the ABV I should target, averaged over every type of liquid I drank that night?
Regular beer contains about 20x as much water as it does ethanol (by volume), but apparently that's not enough. It's certainly better than wine, though, which only contains 6-8x the water and an entire catalogue of congeners.
The issue isn't necessarily water ingestion, but that alcohol messes with the body's ability to absorb it to where it's needed. If you're consuming high amounts of alcohol and water, and enough alcohol nonetheless builds up, the ability to absorb water goes down. It's one reason why you pee more when drinking.
I could see drinking water, then sobering up, and going to sleep could mean water could then be absorbed. That may limit the effects of the dehydration and therefore the hangover.
Also your body's overall health and efficiency probably pays a role. In my teens/20s I could get sloshed and wake up with merely a vague discomfort. In my 30s I started to get actual hangovers. In my 40s its now just awful almost no matter what I do.
On the plus side, I'm saving money drinking less in general...
IDK, I personally do something like a 0.5 to 1L of water just before lying down. Takes a little bit of forcing myself, as it's way past satiating immediate thirst or dryness in mouth, but I do it as a calculated measure. It pretty much eliminated headaches for me. I'd still feel like shit the next day - sleepy, groggy, unmotivated - but at least my head wouldn't be ringing.
Unless it is a strong beer with 2 digits of alcohol per volume, I rarely get drunk enough on beers alone because of all I need to pee to get to that point.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who just really enjoys the taste of alcohol and would love a way to drink more of it without its effects, both the "positive" and the negative side.
It's genuinely one of my big wishes! I'd pay 5x the normal price for a bottle of whisky that neither has the "good" nor "bad" parts, as if it was water but with the same taste.
Unless I'm missing something, that just seems like standard non-alcoholic drinks. Which miss the key flavour ingredient I'm talking about - the alcohol! The way it tingles your mouth, the warmth as it goes down, it completely changes the taste profile. Chemistry is not my strong suit so I have no idea if there's any substitutes that could be used to mimic this but without the health effects (good/bad), but until then, nothing nonalcoholic will taste anything like a spirit.
Some is down to the metabolic products of ethanol, specifically aldehydes. There are other alcohols (like tert-Amyl alcohol) that people have used recreationally which don't cause hangovers in the same way.
There are other great reasons not to mess with these substances (tert-Amyl is very long lasting and as little as 30ml might kill you), but they do show that some of the hangover is down to the specifics of ethanol's breakdown in the body.
I have really awful genetics for drinking(I'm 23 and already experience the thing you're describing with taking multiple days to feel good again, and instead of physical symptoms I get crushing depression) so I'd love to just take some of this stuff before a night out to drink the same volume as other people without having to deal with the aftereffects.
just made an account to chime in, I also experience this immense depression after drinking so you're not alone, will probably quit altogether before too long.
Eh, maybe for some. Alcohol has anti-anxiety effects and "loosens" me up. Cannabis has a pretty good track record of making me anxious, even in small amounts. And while it can make me feel comfortable just chilling out, it's not the same sort of mental relaxation and it doesn't work as a social lubricant.
(All of this is obviously just for me. Well aware that different things affect different people...differently.)
Its cyclical. The tolerance for hangovers and the recovery period went down (god do I hate it) therefore I drink less, thus I have a lower tolerance for alcohol.
I'm the same way with whisky. I might have to imitate the professional tasters: just swirl and spit. Seems like a travesty but less so than letting my collection gather dust indefinitely.
Interesting. My wife and I have been almost exclusively drinking non-alcoholic beers in the past few years, as we discovered they taste almost exactly the same as regular beers of the same brands.
But then again, we're not beer tasters or into craft stuff, so maybe we can't tell.
Naltrexone is a good alternative to this that doesn't make you physically sick. It just dulls the effect to the point where you kinda just get bored of drinking.
I can’t stand the taste of any alcohol. I literally only consume it for one reason. The intoxicating effect. I get enough to get the job done then stop.
So this gel seems like drinking less booze with extra steps. I do see a use for women and undercover cops though. Or to make people think you are drunker than you are.
They already noted in the article that once it’s passed into your bloodstream this approach is useless. I see it more like being a better form of naltrexone, someone takes it before going on a night out and saves themselves a nasty hangover while getting to party. I’ve always disliked the lack of availability of low alcohol beers in the States (1-2%) and this could be a decent solution for that. As is the easiest thing to do for moderation when going out in the States for me is to do the One On One Off where you alternate between one moderate alcohol drink and one NA drink. It would be more ideal to just pop a pill right before I go out that lets me tailor the level of absorption exactly as I want it.
I was unaware of people using naltrexone for hangover prevention and did a bit of spot research, it seems naltrexone only prevents the buzz/euphoria from alcohol consumption but doesn't prevent impairment or hangover symptoms, such as those caused by dehydration, nor does it prevent liver damage.
If you’ve never taken it before: it reduces cravings too. If your goal is to get drunk, it won’t stop you, but it does help to quell the dopamine beast if that’s not your goal
> someone takes it before going on a night out and saves themselves a nasty hangover while getting to party
But if their way of partying is to get drunk, this gel will prevent them from partying, since getting drunk requires the alcohol to get into your bloodstream.
I wonder how that would affect the calories of the alcohol. Apparently the ethanol gets broken down into acetic acid, which I believe can't be digested further? Does that mean you also wouldn't gain weight when drinking dry beer or wine?
EDIT: Apparently acetic acid _does_ have calories. Didn't know that.
> Apparently acetic acid _does_ have calories. Didn't know that.
Calories are measured by burning the substance. While it very precisely determines contained energy in the physics sense, it's a question whether all that energy is used by digestion? Especially if it's something the body treats as a toxin and wants to remove as soon as possible?
A bit pedantic but burning is a chemical reaction, and redox reactions are redox reactions no matter where they're happening.
Also, substances like ethanol and acetic acid are not digested, they pretty much just go straight into the bloodstream. There is a limit on how much e.g. ethanol the liver can process per hour, which does put a cap on how many of ethanol's calories are released as ATP + body heat. Acetic acid is a normal temporary metabolite though and so its consumption is much more complete (it gets used by cells all over).
From this article[0] it seems ~60% of the calories in lager come from the alcohol - presumably ~40% come from carbohydrates. And from Google, acetic acid is 349 kcal / 100g, versus pure ethanol at 700 kcal / 100g. So if this approach converted 100% of alcohol to acetic acid, you'd drop the calories from lager by ~30% overall. To your question, dry wine or lower-carb beer would be proportionally even better.
The flip-side of this is perhaps consumption of too much acetic acid! It's impossible to calculate potential toxicity without understanding the strength of the acetic acid generated, though.
> And from Google, acetic acid is 349 kcal / 100g, versus pure ethanol at 700 kcal / 100g.
Metabolism matters. Gasoline is over 800kcal/100g, but you wouldn't get that much from it (if anything at all).
Alcohol has a particularly long metabolic pathway, which after ingesting approximately 20-30g gets cut short to one where acetic acid is excreted (commonly known as "breaking the seal") and the overall upper energy yield limit becomes approximately 110kcal/100g.
Executive summary is that on a given session it's the first two 12oz (330ml) beers which provide most of the calories from alcohol and their contribution is on par with a snickers bar.
Anything you can do with a magic chemical you can do with preparation. Here’s a mind-blowing option. Stop drinking and then you don’t have to deal with:
The fact that it’s killing you.
The fact that you might kill somebody else while driving.
The latest science says the safe number of drinks might be one. Per week. If you’re not keeping it to that you’re harming your health. (And if you’re keeping it to one per week there’s no need to break it down in the body) just keep it out of there to begin with.
Jim Koch, founder and brewer of Sam Adams, says that he mixes a teaspoon of bakers yeast (not sure which) and yogurt to break down the alcohol before it hits the bloodstream and has been doing it for years if not decades.
One guy says it works. The rest of the article is about a small experiment that showed otherwise. Then it quotes experts who explain why it doesn't work and called it an urban legend.
I heard a different variant of this, which is that Jim Koch the brewer at Sam Adams is a functioning alcoholic who drinks a lot throughout the day. The yogurt and yeast is an unrelated thing that he claims to work.
> "Yeast can degrade ethanol," says microbiologist Benjamin Tu of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. "But they love other sugars — glucose, maltose — more. When those sugars are around, the cells turn off the genes needed for alcohol degradation."
Hypothetically, if the yeast could work fast enough(I'm 99% sure it can't unless he's leaving the mixture in a sealed container for a few months before drinking it) wouldn't this result in straight vinegar
I've always been slightly surprised that there have been no breakthroughs on ways to sober up, and especially on ways to feel less of the effects the next day. Yes it would be a worthy thing for society, but also, whoever achieves it would make vast amounts of money.
If you're an alcoholic, and your body is physically dependent on alcohol consumption, would this allow you to satisfy your physical cravings without the deleterious effects normally associated with alcohol addiction? Kind of like how a nicotine patch helps satisfy the physical addiction?
That's exactly what benzodiazepines are for, but only for short-term taper protocols as the dependence/withdrawal profile over the long term is worse than alcohol. Medium-term can be covered by gabapentin.
I know an alcoholic who was also addicted to gabapentin. It didn't reduce his alcoholism, and even when he tried to stop drinking, he would get stoned on the gabapentin (and was largely unaware of his diminished state)
>> breaks down alcohol in the gastrointestinal tract without harming the body.
Likely no. This stuff will destroy the alcohol before it enters the bloodstream. So it sounds useful to stop people absorbing more alcohol (pumping the stomach situations) but won't do much for alcohol already in the blood and causing effects in the body.
Woudn't people just consume more alcohol to compensate the one destroyed by this invention? My guess is that some persons drink until they are drunk, not until they took N glasses of drinks.
what for? sugar is already broken down in your body into glucose to be absorbed. there are already enzymes you can take to help break it down faster, but it's all going to be absorbed regardless.
perhaps what you really want is something to block glucose absorption?
You could invent resistant bacteria that eats all the sugar in your stomach. There are already such but they are lethal if you don't do much about them, but maybe it is possible to make nice versions of them that just eats sugar and don't kill you
by eating everything.
Alcohol is a solvent for many flavours. That's why you have a lot of it in perfumes, and that's why alcohol-free drinks don't taste as good as the originals. In Europe, we drink a lot of alcohol with food exactly for that reason (wine dissolves the fats of the sauce or just the meat and mixes and enhances the taste).
I'd really like to enjoy it without any drunkenness afterwards nor any effect on my health.
Yeah, if there was a product that would let me enjoy real wine but the effect of the alcohol would be similar to a 3% mild beer, I would use that fairly often. A typical wine at 11-12% is a bit too strong for many situations.
- drinking it: I really enjoy the feeling of just ingesting beer, wine or spirits, especially with friends or family
- having a nice buzz from it.
However, those two things are, for me, incompatible. If I start drinking a little bit, I usually don't stop until I'm way beyond the "nice buzz". As the joke goes, "one beer is not enough, two beers are just enough, three beers really aren't enough".
Having something that would allow me to keep drinking without jeopardizing my body, my mind, and the day after would be a huge game changer.
Sounds like maybe the "alcohol free"/"0.0%" beer (not really 100% alcohol free) is something you should try. Tastes and looks like beer, but doesn't come with the buzz (which is the thing that your brain hooks into and uses to tell you it isn't enough yet).
> I have tried almost every major non-alcoholic beer in the U.S., and none of them truly taste exactly like beer.
Agreed, but if you drink them exclusively for a few weeks, your taste buds and brain will reframe around them, and it'll cease to be a problem. I did this with Brewdog's Punk AF, and after 2 weeks on that, most non-alcoholic beers triggered my brain's "I'm drinking beer!" response.
It's a lot of work for overpriced soft drinks, and isn't for everyone.
Also, I'm back to drinking real beer again anyway.
Microdosing psilocybin (shrooms) is amazing at letting me go out and just have 1-2 beers while still giving the slight affect of a nice anxiety-free buzz. I'm what I'd call a nervous drinker. I'm ADHD and sitting still can be rough for me, so at bars I tend to drink a lot very fast because the only fidgeting I can do without looking strange is .. cup to face over and over.
Obviously not something everyone wants to do or can do, it's legal for me, but it's great for basically taking my interest in alcohol away after a beer or two. Microdosing is usually 1/10th or less what a "normal" light dose would be (going with 1-2g dose here, so 0.1/0.2). No weird/visual/hallucination effects or anything like that.
You just feel a bit lighter and relaxed. Been a big game changer for me since I go out all the time. A bunch of my service industry friends and I do it and they've all started drinking significantly less.
Naltrexone is great too but it's probably easier to get someone to microdose than ask their doctor for that which is unfortunate. You won't get a buzz with that, you'll just get bored of drinking by your 2nd beer and move on to doing other things which can also be nice at times.
There's many occasions where I don't want to drink, but not doing so can make things uncomfortable. It's unfortunate, but there's lots of occasions where abstaining can make other people uncomfortable, or cause them to give you a hard time, or any number of other things. I would love to be able to take something that allows me drink but with none of the side effects, just to avoid potential uncomfortable situations. Again, I'm not condoning the behavior and it's unfortunate that this is how society is sometimes. But it would be nice to have this option.
There's also people who have difficulty controlling their drinking once they start. This would certainly help in those scenarios.
Another example is a situation where a woman may be pregnant so doesn't want to drink, but may not be far enough along that she wants people to know. Not drinking would get people wondering, but drinking could harm the fetus. I don't know if this gel would make drinking safe in that scenario - but if it does, that would be a great situation to use it in.
Agreed. And ideally that shouldn't matter. But in the real world there are other consequences and side effects. Maybe I don't want to make them uncomfortable. Maybe I just don't want to deal with the nagging, "busting my chops", or the questions about why I'm not drinking. Maybe I want to avoid some preconceived notions certain people may have about people who don't drink. So even if it's on them, there are still personal reasons I may want to avoid the situation.
People will take their cue from you as to how to respond. If you act embarrassed about it, they’ll react accordingly. If it’s no big deal to you, same thing for them.
I quit cold turkey years ago. I was worried about the same things. But even my most macho & hard-drinking friends just accepted it without comment.
I encountered a lot of peer pressure to drink when I was in college. (I didn't drink much because a lot of alcohol makes my stomach upset.)
Don't surround yourself with people who make you uncomfortable. It's a lesson I realized as I got older: It has little to do with drinking; but if the people around you make you feel uncomfortable not drinking, then you're around the wrong people.
The hardest part of reducing my alcohol consumption is that I love red wine so much. The flavor, the aroma, the acidity, everything. I have stopped drinking all alcohol except red wine because of the health effects. I would be delighted to have a way to drink wine without any intoxication.
I know red wine is just as bad for me as any other alcohol, which is to say quite bad, and in any dose. I meant I've largely quit because of that. But I just can't quit you, Red Wine.
Non-alcoholic beer sales are close to $40B/year globally and going up. Generally speaking, the flavor of non-alcoholic beer pales in comparison to the real thing.
Then there's also the market for wine and spirits.
The Athletic seasonals are way better than their "always available." And the Free Wave is better than the Run Wild for the always available beers. They had an Irish Stout (Emerald Coast) that was indistinguishable. I could have blind taste tested them. There's some fantastic single-hop beers too.
I couldn't get into the Untitled Art. Just too sweet.
> Generally speaking, the flavor of non-alcoholic beer pales in comparison to the real thing.
Ehhh... that's a bit of an overstatement, though I mostly agree.
I just happened to be doing a crapload of bar hopping this last month and got into trying different non-alcoholic beers because they're way more prevalent than they used to be.
They're certainly a lot better than the nonalcoholic beers of yore. And it's also obvious that you're not drinking a traditional beer. Undoubtedly, it has to do with the lack of ethanol present, but I can't help but think it's got to do with the process of producing them. Nonalcoholic beers, from what I've noticed, are usually much less foamy than alcoholic beer.
I will generally still drink alcoholic beer since I don't seem to have alcoholism in me, but I think it's great that people are being given options. When I was younger, I really hated it when people would pressure me to drink or act like I'm an alien for not wanting to drink, and nonalcoholic beer is inconspicuous enough that people can drink socially without the peculiar attitude. Although that attitude seems to have largely gone away anyway.
I like really strong drinks like overproof whiskey and IPAs and craft cocktails, which can be shockingly alcoholic sometimes. It would be nice to have essentially a higher alcohol tolerance so I could drink the drinks I like most more freely. Now, I usually just eat a huge meal before I drink a lot, but a pill would be much better.
Almost any social drinking setting is going to have some people drink more than they're comfortable with. Having some way to mitigate the effects is wonderful.
I honestly don't "get" why someone would use this? It doesn't reverse intoxication, and it doesn't prevent alcohol from entering the bloodstream.
I get that alcoholic drinks taste better than their non-alcoholic counterparts (frozen margaritas are so much better than slush puppies,) but this won't prevent the buzz / intoxication.
Depending on the time of action it could be very useful in addressing the "lag" in alcohol hitting your system. If someone is drinking heavily, they regularly reach an uncomfortable level of intoxication before all the alcohol in their stomach has been absorbed. This could help folks in that situation.
Zbiotics targets acetaldehyde, not ethyl alcohol. From the article:
> The gel shifts the breakdown of alcohol from the liver to the digestive tract. In contrast to when alcohol is metabolised in the liver, no harmful acetaldehyde is produced as an intermediate product,” explains Professor Raffaele Mezzenga from the Laboratory of Food & Soft Materials at ETH Zurich. Acetaldehyde is toxic and is responsible for many health problems caused by excessive alcohol consumption.
Using this gel would manifest as simply not being as intoxicated, whereas Zbiotics is intended to allow for intoxication but prevent the hangover afterwards.
I honestly wonder whether people would drink alcohol if there weren't intoxicating effects. What I mean is, does anyone really believe that alcohol is pleasant to drink or is that purely a trick of the mind/body to get you to satisfy the craving?
It was mentioned elsewhere in the thread, but alcohol is an amazing chemical for absorbing other potent flavors. It's why it's commonly used for herb extracts and medicines. Part of what I like about many alcoholic drinks is they have pungent flavors that are hard to find elsewhere. An herbal liquor is going to often have much stronger flavor of the herbs than you'd get from making a tea or a soda.
There's also more diversity in the options because it's a natural preservative. Much easier for a store to stock niche-flavored spirits in small quantities when they functionally never go bad, which in turn helps keep a market for niche products that wouldn't exist if they needed steady high demand. Even something as popular as Fernet Branca doesn't really have a flavor equal in any other beverage class.
Fermentation, distillation, and aging can all create unique and incredibly rich flavors that may be very compelling on their own or as complements to other flavors in food and drink.
Perhaps you haven't tried very many and haven't run into any you like, but they're sure out there. From a culinary perspective, it's no accident that wines and beers and spirits represent enormous industries around the world and have done so for centuries.
If it was all just about getting tipsy or drunk, you'd expect there to be just a few "winners" of the market rather than the incredible variety we seem to have instead.
I drink, probably too much, and feel like I enjoy the flavors of many different drinks. But I don't think that's evidence that it's not really just a chemical dependence. I certainly remember there was a time when I didn't enjoy the flavors I believe I do now.
Your point about variety is good but, again playing devil's advocate, maybe that's necessary to keep drinking socially acceptable and sustain the illusion that there's more to it than just addiction?
The most convincing argument though is that we do enjoy the flavors of fermented things that aren't intoxicating.
It's both right? Alcohol is a dopaminergic[1] in all amounts. Your brain, to some degree, likes you drinking (which may be offset by side effects). A much smaller group of people genuinely enjoy the taste and physical experience of drinking alcohol. Non-alcoholic taste-matched substitutes are common.
I strongly suspect that, if alcohol was banned, you would see a bigger market for taste-matched "mocktails" with the same sharp, chemical undertones. However, there's no market now because moderate drinkers can just get a drink and people who don't like they taste don't want them.
Oh! That's great. The mocktails I've seen are generally complex, well-crafted drinks that are missing the bite that makes alcoholic drinks so satisfying to sip. I guess I need to check out more mocktails.
I certainly don't speak for everyone but I certainly drank for the effects. I do like the flavour of beer but it was all about the effects. I could never have just one or two (which is why I no longer drink).
Again, I don't speak for everyone. I do know people who drink frequently without ever getting drunk, but obviously even one drink has some effect.
Non-alcoholic beer is an entire product category and popular in the Middle East. Russians have a fermented bread drink called Kvass that is <1% alcohol.
I have known some people to have an absurdly low tolerance (or at least act drunk after two standard drinks), but I don't think it's that common.
I do have plenty of friends who drink in moderation simply because they enjoy the taste of beer/wine and almost never get drunk (they might drink enough to be drunk once a year).
I think the comparison is most understandable when you compare alcohol to caffeine. Some people drink coffee for the sake of the caffeine, but some also just genuinely enjoy the taste/social aspect (hence why decaf exists).
Don't know how common it is, but my tolerance is super low.
Even a single sip of wine, and I'll start to feel pressure in temples. One full glass and my head movement -> visual perception latency will be noticeable, and my words will start a bit getting in the order wrong. That one glass will also hit me like a sleeping pill within an hour. And if it's beer or red wine, I'll enjoy itchy arms, chest, and legs for a couple of hours.
So partially a reaction to alcohol (the sleepiness for sure) and partially an allergic reaction to tannins/hops/etc.
I love a riesling or a mint mojito, but I keep to probably one drink every few months... and then regret it all over again.
On the other hand, there's so many alcoholics in my extended family and my best friends growing up, that I consider my body's rejection of alcohol to be a strong contributor to me being successful in life and work.
This reminds me so much of the advice people give folks with adhd, just get organized, use a calendar, use a pomodoro timer. If that stuff worked for me I wouldn't have adhd.
If exercising restraint worked no one would have alcoholism. It's not a moral failing, it's a physical condition.
Well, it can certainly help them but it's similar to telling depressed people that they should just exercise, read books and be happy. If I'd be that easy, it wouldn't be that much of an issue.
I'm ADD and telling me to just get organized or start using a pomodoro timer is pretty boilerplate, worthless advice.
I think writing this advice off as unhelpful is actually more harmful than offering it in the first place. I think this is very real and very helpful advice. Is it hard to follow? Speaking from experience: absolutely.
Self-control is like a muscle: exercise it frequently, and it gets stronger. It also gets tired and needs rest, and it atrophies with disuse.
And like exercise, it's almost always beneficial. Even folks with physical disabilities see very real benefits from exercise, even when it's hard and painful! I used to live next door to a man who walked with a cane and very obviously struggled to go up and down stairs... And yet any time I would offer him help, he would refuse, because he knew the effort would keep him as mobile and active as he could be, given his circumstances--and do accept that help would actually harm him in the long run by accelerating the decline in his abilities. I doubt I would have his level of discipline were I in his situation, and to this day I envy that of him.
I think going so far as to say "telling someone to exercise self-control is unhelpful/unsympathetic" is exactly analogous to telling someone exercise is harmful. Not "too much exercise is harmful", but "any exercise is harmful", which is obviously untrue.
I'll be the first to acknowledge that humans are innately lazy, and that exercise is hard/boring/inconvenient/whatever. However, we do no one justice by giving them reasons to excuse that laziness. Justifying a lack of internal effort/ability should be and explanation of last resort, not the baseline.
Put differently: very few people are physically incapable of doing a pushup (or whatever other basic exercise you want to reference) due to actual physical limitations. Most who cannot simply haven't put in the work to reach the point where they can.
[E] This turned out longer than I anticipated. It turns out I feel strongly about this, and feel like this is one of the most toxic aspects of the society I feel like I inhabit. People should be encouraged to push their abilities, not given excuses not to. It's all too easy to accept those excuses as truth, and this prevents us all from reaching our highest potential. This feels like a net harm to society and a driver of very real inequality
It absolutely is. Most people become addicted to something because they lacked the self-control to say "no" the first time... And the second time... And so on until it became an addiction.
Also, by saying this you're insulting every person who has broken an addiction by way of exercising their self-control until it's strong enough to overcome the addiction. Some of us don't appreciate that.
Addiction is a psychological disorder - it is not at all a matter of self-control.
Just as being sad is not the same thing as being clinically depressed, and worrying about a review is not the same thing as having an anxiety disorder, people need to stop equating really liking something and being addicted to said thing.
> Addiction is a psychological disorder - it is not at all a matter of self-control.
And self-control is not psychological?
> people need to stop equating really liking something and being addicted to said thing.
Self control is precisely the difference between really linking something and consuming a reasonable/healthy amount of it vs being addicted to it and overconsuming.
The disorder that you dropped from "psychological" is actually semantically important, you know.
> Self control is precisely the difference between really linking something and consuming a reasonable/healthy amount of it vs being addicted to it and overconsuming.
If you were unable to get the hint from the other examples I gave, I'll be plain: you are terribly mistaken, addiction is a disorder of the brain.
What moral failing do you assume people with mood or anxiety disorders have?
> The disorder that you dropped from "psychological" is actually semantically important, you know.
Lack of self control can be described as a 'psychological disorder'. Also you completely avoided the actual question :) - maybe try answering it instead of playing semantics?
> I'll be plain: you are terribly mistaken, addiction is a disorder of the brain.
So you replaced 'phsycological disorder' with 'disorder of the brain'? That's supposed to make your point less pointless?
> What moral failing do you assume people with mood or anxiety disorders have?
Again, nowhere did I mention the word 'moral'. Try to address what I actually said instead of imagining strawmen in every comment.
> If you were unable to get the hint from the other examples I gave
No, I didn't get any 'hint' from your pointless examples. You see, I try to read what you said directly and respond directly, without any imagined 'hints', strawmen, or meaningless semantic games around vague and ambiguous terms.
This is such a false dichotomy. Even if you assume addiction can be a disease, self-control is still absolutely an element in overcoming it.
It's also not necessarily an either/or thing, and the existence of people who have broken addictions through exercise of their own self-control completely dismantles your black-and-white argument.
No it's not. That's a lazy way of thinking. Addiction isn't that simple, and deluding yourself into thinking it's that simple does yourself a disservice. It's not a moral failing, it's a disease.
And it's not lazy or delusional to claim addiction is as simple as being a disease?
If anything, that's a more lazy approach than saying it's a failing of self-control, which is itself a complicated and complex issue (hence my paragraphs and qualifications and whatnot above).
Writing it off as "a disease" removes all agency from the individual involved, whose lack of self-control is probably why they're addicted in the first place. That's true regardless of whether or not the addiction itself is a disease or a lack of self-control.
Saying "it's a disease" is also hugely insulting to the many people who have broken addictions by improving their self control. Even if you consider it a "disease", every person who has accomplished this has proven that the cure sometimes really is "improve your self-control".
And if that works in some cases, how can you prove whether or not it will work in another case without trying it first?
Self control is not 'simple', nor did I say anything about a 'moral failing'. 'Deluding yourself' by arguing against a position you imagined does yourself a disservice and just seems like a simple straw-man.
Whatever addiction, you’ll only get past it by assuming and believing it is under your control, paradoxically. Playing victim is, as very often in life, the opposite of empowering.
Wanting people to understand that they can improve their own self-control is trying to help them. With more self-control comes more agency and more control over one's own outcomes.
How is that being spun as a bad thing? I don't understand how we've reached a point that it's considered more "helpful" to teach people they have no control over their actions, rather than helping them gain more control over those actions?
So people who smoke cigarettes might as well rip out the filters? Drug users at raves shouldn't use test kits? People on motorcycles shouldn't wear helmets?
You are so sarcastic here it is impossible to glean any genuine critique of my position. If this stuff catches on and in 10 years we're all eating strange chemical gel after a round of drinks, I'll hand it to you. I just don't think that will happen.
My body sometimes has a pretty negative reaction to the lactose in milk.
But I like milk, and milk products. I like the taste of it, the ease of it, and the way it makes me feel. It's nice for me, or at least it is until (some time later) it is not nice anymore.
So, I keep inexpensive tablets that contain the lactase enzyme in my kitchen.
Eating one of these tablets around the time that I consume milk completely eliminates the messy unpleasantness that lactose has on me. Poof, gone.
I don't think it's strange at all to do this. In fact, learning that I could easily (and very selectively) deal with my problems with lactose has made a pretty huge improvement in my quality of life.
Why would you think that taking something to remove the unpleasantness of alcohol would be any different, functionally?
I don't know anyone who drinks without the intention of getting drunk, but suppose there was someone, that person could just buy alcohol-free drinks. The same way that I'm sure you would buy lactose-free milk if it was available because that's easier than taking the pill.
There's no shortage of people in these threads who find value in having an alcoholic beverage without the intention of getting drunk, with a variety of reasons stated. I don't need to understand their motivations to appreciate the fact that these motivations exist.
And, no, drinking lactose-free milk isn't "easier" for me than "taking the pill."
1. Lactose-free milk is very available to me. But I do not buy it because it costs me around 2-4x as much by volume compared to regular milk, which is much harder on my pocketbook than the combination of drinking regular milk and eating a $0.10 tablet (which I can get down to $0.06 by buying in larger quantities, if I choose). This has parallels to things like NA beer, wherein: Regular beer can be very cheap, but NA beer is never quite that way.
2. Lactase tablets are much, much more portable than lactose-free milk is. It's very easy to bring some with me when I travel, whereas bringing along lactose-free milk has obvious problems. This portability has parallels with the thing discussed in TFA.
3. Lactose-free milk does not taste like regular milk. Its flavor profile is related, and it can be enjoyed, but it remains different and I strongly prefer regular milk. Even without issues #1 and #2, buying and drinking lactose-free milk can only be "easier" if I'm somehow willing to overlook the fact these are not the same things. This concept has parallels in the discussions that others have here in these threads, wherein people report that regular drinks and NA drinks do not taste the same.
If people drank only to get drunk bars would go out of business instantly. A single drink made with a rail liquor pays for the whole bottle. Like it or not, sharing alcoholic beverages is a social bonding experience for many people, and for connoisseurs, alcohol-free substitutes for those beverages don't have anything close to the depth and quality, but for many reasons, being drunk isn't always desirable. That's why people spit out the wine at wine tastings.
There are a whole lot of people that get a whole lot out of consuming beverages that contain alcohol while not wanting to become intoxicated. Your use case doesn't involve that, but as someone who spent decades working in the food and bev industry, I assure you that you can't generalize your use case to everyone.
If what you're saying is true, bars should sell just as much fruit juice as they do booze. If it's true, then no one should mind being the designated driver. I don't know if you've ever been out for drinks, but the reason you go is to get drunk. Sometimes you want to be more on the tipsy end than on the blackout end, but that is still drinking. The difference between drinking and a tea party is alcohol, and it blows my mind that you don't think that's significant. The people who want to meet up and drink something without alcohol go to cafés, not bars. There's a good reason why these two things haven't been combined.
> If what you're saying is true, bars should sell just as much fruit juice as they do booze.
No-- sharing alcoholic beverages is symbolic in a way fruit juice is not.
> If it's true, then no one should mind being the designated driver.
No-- many people enjoy being intoxicated and sharing alcoholic beverages is an important social bonding exercise to many.
> I don't know if you've ever been out for drinks, but the reason you go is to get drunk.
I worked in bars and nightclubs as a bouncer and bartender for nearly two decades and was a 4-or-5-days-per-week regular in them for about a decade. After not having been to bars frequently in at least 5 years, I've got at least half a dozen bars I could walk into right now and not pay for alcohol. I might know more about this than anyone you've ever met.
> Sometimes you want to be more on the tipsy end than on the blackout end, but that is still drinking. The difference between drinking and a tea party is alcohol, and it blows my mind that you don't think that's significant.
I did not even intimate that drinking alcohol and non-alcoholic beverages isn't significantly different. What you seem to miss is that it's not different in the same way for everybody. Our preferences and experiences can't simply be superimposed on everyone else.
> The people who want to meet up and drink something without alcohol go to cafés, not bars.
Some do. My wife doesn't really drink, hates the smell of coffee, and worked in the service industry for 25 years. When she wants to meet up with friends, she goes to a bar. Not only is it the traditional meeting venue among people we know, it's got an entirely different energy than a cafe does. Usually she drinks seltzer with lemon, but sometimes she has a cocktail because she loves the social act of drinking together and thinks they taste delicious, but always regrets the grogginess, headaches, and other side-effects she gets from alcohol. Sometimes when there's a big round of shots going around-- a very common social bonding tradition, especially among service industry workers-- she often feels compelled to hide the fact that she surreptitiously slipped me the shot because I have a much higher tolerance. I discretely hand the empty glass back to her and she puts it down. This has happened literally dozens of times. If there was a way for her to partake in the shot or have a cocktail with friends while not having the requisite physical effects, she'd jump on it.
Beyond that, bartenders doing shots with customers is a huge money maker. When customers feel like they're having an experience with a bartender rather than one provided by a bartender, it's an entirely different experience. It's more fun for the customers, sometimes more fun for the bartenders, and usually elicits much bigger tips. A bartender being able to consume a bunch of alcohol and maintain coherency would be a huge boon. Right now, a lot of them just do a bunch of coke or chew on adderall-- beyond maybe 30 that loses its appeal pretty quickly. That's what the line cooks did in an 'edgy' place I cooked at with an open kitchen where customers could buy the kitchen staff beer. We were expected to drink it and look like we're having fun in an extremely high-volume, high-performance kitchen. Lots of key bumps and popped pills would be replaced with a product that made it unnecessary.
> There's a good reason why these two things haven't been combined.
... they haven't? Some cafes serve alcohol-- several coffee/pastry shops in my city serve wine and cocktails. Even a few of the breakfast/lunch focused diners have full bars. Brunch is essentially breakfast with optional cocktails. Some bars serve coffee. I worked as a chef at a little rock club that was a portuguese expat bar during the day-- old timers would line up outside at 8am waiting for the doors to open up so they could sip espresso, read the newspaper, and chat. Some would occasionally have a brandy at some point, some would stay for lunch and have a beer. Many wouldn't, and were just there for the community.
One of the most popular nightclubs in a city I lived in opened at 2am-- after the legally mandated last call time-- and they never sold one drop of alcohol. Some people went there to use other kinds of drugs. Lots of people went there who didn't drink but enjoyed being in a nightclub atmosphere without the pressure to drink. Some were recovering alcoholics. Some just wanted to dance after other clubs had closed and drank a lot beforehand. Some were underage and it was the only club they could get into. Some tried to sneak their own alcohol in, though security was necessarily tight for legal reasons and they rarely succeeded.
One large raucous club I bounced at was near several large colleges. Knowing it was a magnet for bad behavior, the sports teams would send in members of their disciplinary staff undercover to spy on students-- I'll bet many of them would jump at the opportunity to drink something other than soda while finely controlling their intoxication level. Hell, I'll bet the higher-performing athletes would relish the opportunity to go to a frat party and drink alcohol as a social exercise without totally screwing up their training schedule. It would certainly make hazing a lot safer.
People's relationship with alcohol is just not that cut-and-dried. It's an incredibly complex topic, and you can't just take your experience and use case for something and superimpose it on the rest of humanity.
> No-- sharing alcoholic beverages is symbolic in a way fruit juice is not.
> No-- many people enjoy being intoxicated and sharing alcoholic beverages is an important social bonding exercise to many.
Okay so I feel like you didn't really get my argument here. I said "if X, then Y", but it's obvious that Y isn't the case, so I'm implying that X also isn't true. So you informing my that Y isn't true hasn't added much to the conversation. An alcoholic drink without alcohol is just juice, the fact that there is no demand for juice at bars suggests that there would also be little demand for non-alcoholic drinks. Especially when you have to consume some weird gel afterwards. I was refuting your point by saying it implied something which isn't true. This is known as "reductio ad absurdum" and is a fairly common argumentative tactic.
> I might know more about this than anyone you've ever met.
Just because you've sold people drinks doesn't mean you understand why people buy them. I think you probably don't given you think this weird gel stuff could ever be popular.
> sometimes she has a cocktail because she loves the social act of drinking together and thinks they taste delicious
Alcohol-free cocktails exist. They are called "mocktails" and are very popular if I understand correctly. What the gel offers is the experience of a mocktail with the addition of a strange chemical jelly substance that you have to eat. No one is going to buy that.
> she often feels compelled to hide the fact that she surreptitiously slipped me the shot because I have a much higher tolerance
So now she will feel compelled to hide the fact that she's eating the gel. You've just shifted the problem forward a few seconds. Either she drinks, or she doesn't drink and hides it. Changing the mechanism of how it's hidden doesn't change the fact that she's hiding it. This is a product that simply sounds good in theory without offering much practically.
> having an experience with a bartender
It's fun because the bartender is getting drunk. If the bartender was just taking shots of water, I don't think it would work as well. A shot of Vodka minus the alcohol is essentially a shot of water with a funny aftertaste, which is what you are proposing. I suppose you could trick customers into tipping this way by hiding the gel, but you could also do that by discretely swapping a shot out for plain water. I just think people would get a little suspicious if the bartender is knocking back shots and not getting drunk.
> I'll bet the higher-performing athletes would relish the opportunity to go to a frat party and drink alcohol as a social exercise without totally screwing up their training schedule
Again, you assume that drinking liquid is the social aspect, but it isn't. The social thing, as you have said earlier, is getting drunk which this gel prevents. If you drink a glass of cider then down this gel, you have just drunk a glass of apple juice, and as we've established, juice and alcohol have different social purposes.
> Just because you've sold people drinks doesn't mean you understand why people buy them. I think you probably don't given you think this weird gel stuff could ever be popular.
A) Saying that as a decades-long professional in this business that I don't understand people's motivation for purchasing the product is pretty ridiculous. It's not like I was a distiller-- understanding why, when, where and how people consumed alcohol was why I was successful in that business. Beyond that, monitoring peoples alcohol consumption is a critical part of the job.
B) As I said, I spent over a decade as a 4-5 night per week regular in bars.
C) As a bouncer, I specifically engaged with the way people use alcohol and interact in situations not just selling it to them.
I deeply understand what goes on on both sides of the bar. It was my profession and hobby.
> An alcoholic drink without alcohol is just juice, the fact that there is no demand for juice at bars suggests that there would also be little demand for non-alcoholic drinks.
> Alcohol-free cocktails exist. They are called "mocktails" and are very popular if I understand correctly.
I think we're just about done here. Have a nice day.
Sorry-- you're just completely, factually wrong. It's not just the market where I am, either. I just did a google search for "best mocktails in [New York/London/Paris/Los Angeles]" and every one of the top articles almost exclusively highlighted bars or restaurants with bars-- all establishments that primarily serve alcoholic cocktails. If that's not true where you are, where you are is not representative. If you don't believe me, Google "why do people drink mocktails" and honestly consider if your assumptions match your research.
Because they taste good. Does this gel taste good? Probably not. It is fundamentally unpleasant, pointless, and strange. It solves a problem that has better solutions everyone is familiar with. It offers people nothing but discomfort and abnormality, and worse most people don't even understand what it does. It is perhaps the epitome of an unmarketable product.
Well, you seem really committed to not challenging your assumption that your perspective on this is universal despite my presenting plenty of evidence to the contrary. I've explained my expertise and shown you how to confirm my understanding of the topic with entirely unrelated sources, and you've inexplicably disregarded both. If you think that your understanding of this issue is somehow reflects reality more accurately than stacks of articles from food and beverage magazines that literally say the opposite, you've clearly already reached your conclusion and aren't entertaining any contrary information. There's obviously no productive path for this conversation to continue.
I really hope you reflect on whether you're more interested in being right, or feeling right, because the difference is consequential.
> shown you how to confirm my understanding of the topic with entirely unrelated sources
You told me to Google it. I'll make a guess that you aren't the academic type, but trust me when I say that generally isn't accepted as a source.
> I really hope you reflect on whether you're more interested in being right, or feeling right, because the difference is consequential.
And what's brilliant is that I can both be and feel correct in the knowledge that this stuff will never be popular. You'd struggle to give it away for free, let alone get people to pay for it.
> you aren't entertaining any contrary information
I've entertained plenty of contrary information and explained why I don't believe it. You've addressed almost nothing I've said except by making spurious claims that you working as a bartender more than half a decade ago somehow means you are psychically in tune with people, and they all went to eat weird anti-alcohol jelly.
I really hope you can reflect on how to make actually convincing arguments for your perspective instead of just calling people stupid and flaunting your """experience""" while ignoring everything you are told.
> If what you're saying is true, bars should sell just as much fruit juice as they do booze.
No-- sharing alcoholic beverages is symbolic in a way fruit juice is not.
> If it's true, then no one should mind being the designated driver.
No-- many people enjoy being intoxicated and sharing alcoholic beverages is an important social bonding exercise to many.
> I don't know if you've ever been out for drinks, but the reason you go is to get drunk.
I worked in bars and nightclubs as a bouncer and bartender for nearly two decades and was a 4-or-5-days-per-week regular in them for about a decade. After not having been to bars frequently in at least 5 years, I've got at least half a dozen bars I could walk into right now and not pay for alcohol. I might know more about drinking in public than anyone you've ever met.
> Sometimes you want to be more on the tipsy end than on the blackout end, but that is still drinking. The difference between drinking and a tea party is alcohol, and it blows my mind that you don't think that's significant.
Maybe you should re-read what I wrote. Not once did I even intimate that drinking alcohol and non-alcoholic beverages isn't significantly different. What you don't seem to realize is that it's not different in the same way for everybody. Believe it or not, you can't generalize your preferences and experiences to everyone else. You just can't.
> The people who want to meet up and drink something without alcohol go to cafés, not bars.
Some do. My wife doesn't really drink, hates the smell of coffee, and worked in the service industry for 25 years. When she wants to meet up with friends, she goes to a bar. Not only is it the traditional meeting venue among people we know, it's got an entirely different energy than a cafe does. Usually she drinks seltzer with lemon, but sometimes she has a cocktail because she loves the social act of drinking together and thinks they taste delicious, but always regrets the grogginess, headaches, and other side-effects she gets from alcohol. Sometimes when there's a big round of shots going around-- a very common social bonding tradition, especially among service industry workers-- she often feels compelled to hide the fact that she surreptitiously slipped me the shot because I have a much higher tolerance. I discretely hand the empty glass back to her and she puts it down. This has happened literally dozens of times. If there was a way for her to partake in the shot or have a cocktail with friends while not having the requisite physical effects, she'd jump on it.
Beyond that, bartenders doing shots with customers is a huge money maker. When customers feel like they're having an experience with a bartender rather than one provided by a bartender, it's an entirely different experience. It's more fun for the customers, sometimes more fun for the bartenders, and usually elicits much bigger tips. A bartender being able to consume a bunch of alcohol and maintain coherency would be a huge boon. Right now, a lot of them just do a bunch of coke or chew on adderall-- beyond maybe 30 that loses its appeal pretty quickly. That's what the line cooks did in an 'edgy' place I cooked at with an open kitchen where customers could buy the kitchen staff beer. We were expected to drink it and look like we're having fun in an extremely high-volume, high-performance kitchen. Lots of key bumps and popped pills would be replaced with a product that made it unnecessary.
> There's a good reason why these two things haven't been combined.
... they haven't? Some cafes serve alcohol-- several coffee/pastry shops in my city serve wine and cocktails. Even a few of the breakfast/lunch focused diners have full bars. Brunch is essentially breakfast with optional cocktails. Some bars serve coffee. I worked as a chef at a little rock club that was a portuguese expat bar during the day-- old timers would line up outside at 8am waiting for the doors to open up so they could sip espresso, read the newspaper, and chat. Some would occasionally have a brandy at some point, some would stay for lunch and have a beer. Many wouldn't, and were just there for the community.
One of the most popular nightclubs in a city I lived in opened at 2am-- after the legally mandated last call time-- and they never sold one drop of alcohol. Some people went there to use other kinds of drugs. Lots of people went there who didn't drink but enjoyed being in a nightclub atmosphere without the pressure to drink. Some were recovering alcoholics. Some just wanted to dance after other clubs had closed and drank a lot beforehand. Some were underage and it was the only club they could get into. Some tried to sneak their own alcohol in, though security was necessarily tight for legal reasons and they rarely succeeded.
One large raucous club I bounced at was near several large colleges. Knowing it was a magnet for bad behavior, the sports teams would send in members of their disciplinary staff undercover to spy on students-- I'll bet many of them would jump at the opportunity to drink something other than soda while finely controlling their intoxication level. Hell, I'll bet the higher-performing athletes would relish the opportunity to go to a frat party and drink alcohol as a social exercise without totally screwing up their training schedule. It would certainly make hazing a lot safer.
People's relationship with alcohol is just not that cut-and-dried. It's an incredibly complex topic, and you can't just take your experience and use case for something and superimpose it on the rest of humanity. It just doesn't work like that.
You know far less about this topic than you think you do.
It's great to share your in-depth experience here, but can you please do that without swipes or crossing into personal attack? This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I'm talking about bits like these:
> Maybe you should re-read what I wrote
> What you don't seem to realize
> You know far less about this topic than you think you do
They don't add to your substantive points, but they do poison the conversation and almost always evoke worse from others. We're trying to avoid that here.
This seems to be useful for people who are either allergic to alcohol or who are trying to keep up or competitively pressure others into intoxication. Otherwise, it would be wiser to just avoid EtOH that has no safe lower intake threshold and is conspicuously expensive.
You can have a few drinks and not get drunk because the alcohol is broken down before it reaches your blood. In other words you can have a couple of alcahol-free drinks where the alcahol is removed from your stomach by strange gel product.
