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Liquor and I have a fragile relationship. Some of my favorite drinks are liquor-based, but so are some of my least favorite. This doesn’t appear to be uncommon. If you give me a bad, cheap beer, I may not be pleased, but neither will I have a significant chance of vomiting — which is what would happen if the drink were Captain Morgan’s.
Part of the problem, this violent aversion, has to do with the fact that liquor is simply stronger than beer, an intrinsic quality that cannot be changed. I’m not Alton Brown, so I don’t have any cool, pseudoscientific anecdotes to support this, but I would assert that the relationship between concentration of alcohol and amount used is not linear. Stated another way, any given mixed drink is likely to be stronger than any given beer of the same volume, as most will not dilute the liquor down to levels comparable to beer. The conventional wisdom of “one mixed drink equals one shot equals one beer” in terms of alcohol content simply does not hold up.
To make things worse, it seems clear that shots, mixed drinks and beer are not consumed in similar ways. Again, relying on conventional drinking wisdom, the average person can metabolize one drink per hour, anything more and you’re drunk — whatever that subjective, arbitrary measure means. When was the last time you saw someone at a bar take a shot and chill for an hour waiting to take another? It’s probably much more common to see someone taking it easy with beer.
So what happens when you drink faster than your body can process? The excess collects in your system and, given sufficient buildup, is expelled from your body as a toxin. Orally. When we are young drinkers, whose boundaries are not finely honed, this occurs more frequently. Another problem of youth is the reliance on others to obtain alcohol, and as someone with undeveloped tastes, you are more likely to relinquish your choice to your buyer, who probably has brand loyalties and very specific tastes of their own.
Thus you encounter my problem: You’ve had so many terrible, sickly nights on a specific type of liquor that its scent alone makes you want to vomit. This almost never happens with beer, because it is not normally consumed tremendously faster than it can be processed. It can happen, however, if the beer in question is designed to be consumed in large quantity, such as malt liquor.
There is no good solution to the problem, no way to get young drinkers to see the error in their ways so their future selves may not incur this vomiting reflex. Traditional, DARE-style alcohol education works about as well as abstinence-only sex education: that is, not at all. Nor does encouraging drinkers to consume responsibly or in moderation. Boundaries really must be acquired by experience to be effective.
After the fact, however, your body can be conditioned to react differently. Although I avoided rum for years, I recently consumed it in a Dark and Stormy without knowing it was an ingredient. The drink is now one of my favorites, and I’ve started exploring rum again in a guarded way. The trick to maximizing pleasure — and that’s really the point of drinking: not to avoid alcohol you hate, but to ask yourself why you do and try to find a new way to experience it.
Bangor Daily News