A Guide to Alcoholic Beverages, by a Clueless Drinker

By Jacob Marrinson on April 25, 2017

Having only just escaped the legal status of minor-dom, my drinking experience is fairly limited. Sure, all students get their not-quite-legal drink on from time to time, and I was no exception — you’re not a cop, right? — but I’d still say that my drinking experience, by the age of 21, is less extensive than most students’.

Nevertheless, I have taken it upon myself to pen this treatise on the most popular varieties of alcohol, based on my own scant knowledge and unsubstantiated biases, and aided by the vast trove of pop-culture cliches that I have absorbed. With any luck, my uninformed perspective will be, if not useful, then at least entertaining.

1. Beer

Arguably the most popular drink in all of history, beer was once more widely — and probably more wisely — consumed than water, which was notoriously unreliable until fairly recently. These days, even though clean drinking water is now ubiquitously available in developed nations — gross travesties of human rights in the Midwest aside — beer remains the refreshment of choice for those who prefer their intoxication to be not only distasteful but also slow.

2. Wine

Beer’s fancy cousin, functionally speaking. Self-fashioned connoisseurs like to imagine that they can detect the differences between even subtle varieties of wine. Science has roundly dismissed this silly myth, proving via taste testing that even the so-called experts can’t really tell the difference between a ‘76 Sauvignon Blanc and a ‘07 Chardonnay. Wine tastes about as bad as beer, but you don’t need to drink as much of it to achieve the intended effect, which gives it a slight edge.

3. Fortified Wine

Fortified wine is fairly hit-or-miss. In general, it’s a better choice than normal wine because it gets you drunk faster, but occasionally the attempts to make it more palatable will have the opposite effect. Mad Dog 20/20, for instance, is clearly intended to look like liquid candy, but tastes like someone left a jolly rancher soaking in a swamp for a few months.

Fortified wine also suffers from a certain economic stigma, but you’re not going to let that get to you, are you?

4. Cider

Actually, cider tastes pretty good.

5. Whiskey

Getting into the hard liquors now. Since alcohol is a means to an end, and anyone who says otherwise is either lying, misguided, or drunk, hard liquor is really all you should be bothering with. Because all spirits taste like various flavors and intensities of paint thinner, the difference mostly comes down to image. Whiskey (in this case, really, bourbon) has traditionally been advertised as the favorite of hard-drinkin’, hard-fightin’, all-American tough guys, and they can keep it.

6. Rum

Rum is probably the most drinkable of the hard liquors, and drinkability is about the highest they can aspire to. If you had to be marooned on a desert island, and you could only have one liquor, it would have to be rum. The pirates knew this, and since marooning was a very real possibility for them, they figured why not cut to the chase and stick to rum anyway? Pirate wisdom is among the shakier varieties of folk wisdom, but they did know their spirits.

7. Gin

Just as it’s impossible to talk about rum without talking about pirates, it’s impossible to talk about gin without talking about Victorian political cartoons and Charles Dickens. In America, gin’s heyday was during prohibition, because it was cheaper, easier, and faster to make than whiskey, America’s actual preference. In its heyday, gin was saddled with classist connotations of indolence and moral corruption, essentially the fortified wine of spirits.

8. Tequila

As much as it is possible for alcohol to harbor sentiments, tequila dislikes you on a molecular level and wants you to hurt. I know that I’ve had experiences with tequila, but unfortunately, I’ve repressed all of the details, making it impossible to recount them here.

9. Vodka

Vodka is actually pretty easy to drink neat because it doesn’t taste like anything but alcohol. In that sense, it’s the perfect liquor. It does its job without making a fuss and it doesn’t need much embellishment to be palatable. At this point I’m sure you expect me to make some crack about Russia, but, if anything, vodka’s enduring association with Glorious Communism only sweetens the pot.

So there you have it. That’s my uninformed and unjustifiably opinionated take on the chief potable intoxicants of our time. If you disagree with my judgment, I invite you to engage in a spirited debate in the comments section. If you’d prefer to submit a more meaningful complaint, I invite you to inquire after my address so you can come to my house and beat me over the head with a book of cocktail recipes.

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