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miseriathome:
fatalism-and-villainy:
fatalism-and-villainy:
was anyone going to tell me that consuming hard liquor and other types of alcohol in the same sitting gets you drunk super quickly, or was I just supposed to experience that myself?
I keep telling people about this experience of mine and how I didn’t know you weren’t supposed to mix different kinds of alcohol, and they’re all horrified and keep saying, “you could die from that! that’s dangerous!” and it’s like great! good thing nobody ever taught me this at any point in my life! Like why isn’t this sort of harm reduction thing taught in schools, instead of Doing Alcohol Is Bad, Don’t Give In To Peer Pressure?
Information below is a combination of alcohol safety bartender training, lived experience as a drinker, and research done both now and in the past. Warning that I am not really sober at the time of writing.
“Beer before liquor, never been sicker; liquor before beer, you’re in the clear” is a relatively common saying (my college’s alcohol ed program explicitely stated it), but it’s not completely factual in and of itself, and a lot of myths about mixing alcohol are only half-truths.
The reason why it’s generally advised to go from harder alcohol to less alcoholic alcohol is because getting buzzed off some pregame beers lowers your inhibition and makes it harder for you to tell how far gone you are, which makes it significantly more difficult for you to pace yourself with liquor shots and respond to your body’s signals to stop. The idea behind gradually drinking less alcohol per drink throughout the night is that it slows your roll for you and makes it harder to get increasingly more fucked up without feeling it.
That being said, there are a lot of factors that can make different kinds of alcohol hit differently; the carbonation in beer can make you feel full and deter you from drinking more until the gas subsides, people trying to appreciate the taste of wine may absorb slightly more through their mouths before it goes into their stomachs, mixing alcohol with caffeine/fats/sugars (eg sodas) will make it absorb way less slowly, and people who are drinking hard liquor won’t feel the majority of its alcoholic effects until it hits their small intestine, which can take quite a while if they’re digesting other food. Those kinds of things will affect the rate, volume, and concentration of alcohol which then affects how quickly it gets absorbed, but different kinds of alcohol don’t like negatively interact with each other, other than being More Alcohol.
The basic idea is that drinking while already slightly tipsy makes it easier for you to get Too Drunk, because the more drunk you are, the less acutely aware you are of the fact that you’re going to be getting More Drunk, plus the fact that as the night goes on, you end up having more and more things to keep track of in order to monitor your inebriation level, for example how much food you’ve had, how far along it is to being digested, and how much unabsorbed alcohol you have looming in your system before that alcohol-soaked-food-in-your-stomach hits your small intestine and actually fucks you up. You could get a decent buzz going off of [small amount of] drinks at the start of the night, but then before those drinks have properly metabolized (past your mouth, past your stomach, into your small intestine), you could have knocked back [double the small amount] more. And then those new drinks hit half and hour later and you’re on the floor because your tipsy brain went “[many] drinks? Great plan.” If you’re drinking jack and cokes all night, they’re all going to fully hit at a fairly steady pace relative to when you put them in your mouth, relative to drinking one carb/air-heavy beer alongside one high proof vodka shot, which will metabolize at staggered paces.
It’s not that mixing alcohol is chemically bad (after all, shot/cocktails which mix different kinds of liquor are a thing, not to mention drinks that mix beer/wine with hard liquor), because alcohol is just alcohol. But the behavior of mixing different kinds of alcohol introduces a bunch of factors which make it easier to miscalculate/be less conscientious, and in terms of numbers and recollection of life experiences makes it seem particularly dangerous.
miseriathome:
fatalism-and-villainy:
fatalism-and-villainy:
was anyone going to tell me that consuming hard liquor and other types of alcohol in the same sitting gets you drunk super quickly, or was I just supposed to experience that myself?
I keep telling people about this experience of mine and how I didn’t know you weren’t supposed to mix different kinds of alcohol, and they’re all horrified and keep saying, “you could die from that! that’s dangerous!” and it’s like great! good thing nobody ever taught me this at any point in my life! Like why isn’t this sort of harm reduction thing taught in schools, instead of Doing Alcohol Is Bad, Don’t Give In To Peer Pressure?
Information below is a combination of alcohol safety bartender training, lived experience as a drinker, and research done both now and in the past. Warning that I am not really sober at the time of writing.
“Beer before liquor, never been sicker; liquor before beer, you’re in the clear” is a relatively common saying (my college’s alcohol ed program explicitely stated it), but it’s not completely factual in and of itself, and a lot of myths about mixing alcohol are only half-truths.
The reason why it’s generally advised to go from harder alcohol to less alcoholic alcohol is because getting buzzed off some pregame beers lowers your inhibition and makes it harder for you to tell how far gone you are, which makes it significantly more difficult for you to pace yourself with liquor shots and respond to your body’s signals to stop. The idea behind gradually drinking less alcohol per drink throughout the night is that it slows your roll for you and makes it harder to get increasingly more fucked up without feeling it.
That being said, there are a lot of factors that can make different kinds of alcohol hit differently; the carbonation in beer can make you feel full and deter you from drinking more until the gas subsides, people trying to appreciate the taste of wine may absorb slightly more through their mouths before it goes into their stomachs, mixing alcohol with caffeine/fats/sugars (eg sodas) will make it absorb way less slowly, and people who are drinking hard liquor won’t feel the majority of its alcoholic effects until it hits their small intestine, which can take quite a while if they’re digesting other food. Those kinds of things will affect the rate, volume, and concentration of alcohol which then affects how quickly it gets absorbed, but different kinds of alcohol don’t like negatively interact with each other, other than being More Alcohol.
The basic idea is that drinking while already slightly tipsy makes it easier for you to get Too Drunk, because the more drunk you are, the less acutely aware you are of the fact that you’re going to be getting More Drunk, plus the fact that as the night goes on, you end up having more and more things to keep track of in order to monitor your inebriation level, for example how much food you’ve had, how far along it is to being digested, and how much unabsorbed alcohol you have looming in your system before that alcohol-soaked-food-in-your-stomach hits your small intestine and actually fucks you up. You could get a decent buzz going off of [small amount of] drinks at the start of the night, but then before those drinks have properly metabolized (past your mouth, past your stomach, into your small intestine), you could have knocked back [double the small amount] more. And then those new drinks hit half and hour later and you’re on the floor because your tipsy brain went “[many] drinks? Great plan.” If you’re drinking jack and cokes all night, they’re all going to fully hit at a fairly steady pace relative to when you put them in your mouth, relative to drinking one carb/air-heavy beer alongside one high proof vodka shot, which will metabolize at staggered paces.
It’s not that mixing alcohol is chemically bad (after all, shot/cocktails which mix different kinds of liquor are a thing, not to mention drinks that mix beer/wine with hard liquor), because alcohol is just alcohol. But the behavior of mixing different kinds of alcohol introduces a bunch of factors which make it easier to miscalculate/be less conscientious, and in terms of numbers and recollection of life experiences makes it seem particularly dangerous.
