Be Excellent To Each Other

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16466646

Lots of News this week around us drinking too much

We have binge drinkers costing the NHS and Police too much every weekend, as well as the secret drinking habbits of the middle classes.

Where do you fit in drinking wise?

Over the years my wife has stopped me drinking in the week, I love to drink but as I get older the hang overs make me think twice.

These day I drink Vodka and diet lemonade and can crack through 300ml of it on a Friday Night. Will drink wine and the odd real ale as well.

Try not to drink in pubs at all as draught larger gives me a really bad head (after 6 or 7 pints!)

So I suppose I'm a secret drinker at home, not sure what class I would be though.

I don't think drinking is a class thing these days as you can get booze at sorts of prices in the supermarket. Even Tesco's new JSA slaves can afford something!

I drink at home because I dont like the people you get in pubs generally speaking, I impulse buy in supermarkets, maybe 12 lagers or cider or something then drink them through the week after work. Also the odd bottle of wine now and then and sometimes I go to a mates house or someone comes here and copious refreshment is had in front of telly Conclusion: I am boring as hell and should be penalised by the system for other peoples crimes.

I'm a "typical" binge drinker - either I drink until I'm drunk or I don't drink at all.

Don't see the point otherwise, to be honest.

Same here, pretty much.

I might have wine if I'm offered it with dinner - especially around someone else's house. If I have it at home I'm typically going to finish off the bottle, though, and then find another one.

Recently, with some exceptions, I thought I'd reverted back to the very middle class- 1 glass of wine with dinner some nights, occassional big nights out- mould that I was in about 7 years ago.

Now I can't remember the last night I didn't have 2+ boozes, but with far fewer piss ups in that time.

Myself, I love drink. But I don't drink to get drunk, though that usually is a byproduct. I like the merry feeling and that is partly it, but beyond that I care not. I do like the taste though. I like a nicely brewed ale - especially the hoppy American ones, and I love red wine and whiskey.

For all that I am going to get absolutely slaughtered on Saturday. In fact that Beeb article looks like it was written with me and Lord Rixondale in mind, for this Saturday is the annual ungodly trial of Pipes & Ales....



May God have mercy on us all.

Gone from three bottles of strong real ale a night when I lived in Wales to not very much, not very often. Feel better. Well, I can feel... which is a start.

I am against the minimum pricing per unit for all drinks, as £1.80 odd for a bottle of Hobgoblin is reasonable, whereas the £2.50 it would become is a flat-out punishment for ale drinkers who do not binge drink in the socially problematic sense. I've worked with alcoholics since 2005 and it's 'cider' and extra strength cooking lager and spirits that need prices bumping.

Alcoholics will just commit crime if they suddenly can't afford their booze though.

Se, I've got drunk with you (around, your sobriety is your own business) and that's fine if you want to do that, but if you end up in A&E then you should be invoiced for it.

In

File me in the 'only really drinks to get drunk' camp, about once a month these days. Other than an occasional beer after a hard day. I always keep some bottles of Becks or Brahma in the fridge for emergencies. Don't feel the urge to bother with them most nights, though. But after talking about it, I think I might have a couple later now...

No idea why I like Becks and Brahma the most for home drinking. They're totally different. And if I'm out, it's whatever decent ale is on tap. In a shit pub that doesn't sell beer, it's Guinness. Then onto the double Jack Danielses.

I never buy the bottles of ale GovYard was talking about, but I always drink them in the pub (tap, not bottled). I just prefer a bottle of lager at home for some reason.

Ooh! Actually I know why I never drink pints of lager in pubs - it's always shit! They're either watered down to piss or have an awful chemical aftertaste. Proper beer and Guinness is usually good though. Likely because young people drink lager generally and the pubs can get away with serving them piss.

Could be you are ordering unpopular beers and are getting a bit of pipe cleaning fluid aftertaste, WTB. I order what other people are drinking, looking around me, talking to them, when I go to a pub, or I have bottles. I certainly never have a Guinness unless there's plenty of pints on tables already. Nothing worse than having the only Guinness to go through that pump in an evening.

I've managed P&A once before (I usually join at 5:30 on the list, owing to having worked Saturdays most times) but I am still wary. We shall see how it plays. I doubt I still have my old two-bottle-of-wine-capacity. The first stop is a breakfast place, so am having a hearty fry up there. Anyway, 14 pints, if William Hague approves of such a session, who are we to argue?

I drink way, way too much. I'd happily get twatted every night. If there's beer in the house it itches at my brain til it's gone, though with good ale I can be happy with a couple of bottles in an evening. sometimes.

Recently I've been drinking sloe gin to reduce the calorific intake.

Main problem is that I inhale drinks, alcoholic or not. I simply cannot drink slowly, it stresses me out.

Currently I'm deliberately not drinking - no booze since Sunday. Partly to prove I can, partly because I need to lose weight and breaking the idle 'bored, drink!' habit will help that a lot.

There are two bottles of delicious champagne and some fruit beers in the fridge, some nasty crabbies, loads of blegh wine and a litre of Russian standard vodka lying around that I'm just not bothered about, and I go the whole workday without desiring a drink, so I know I'm not a real problem drinker.

I don't (normally) drink through the week these days , and just have a couple at the weekend normally. I can drink an alarming amount though when I get going and I fucking love it.

I used to drink way too much, especially when I lived in my flat and had nothing to do except get through at least a bottle of a wine and/or several huge vodka and lemonades as I could just walk to work. I started cutting down a bit when I started needing to drive, and have since reduced it further so I generally don't partake on a work night or if I've just come home from work. The occasional exception is allowed but apart from that I tend to keep it to weekends and days off.

Booze-wise I'll drink just about anything.

(also, follow the link in that story to the haughty looking social anthropologist's article. She makes an excellent point about how anti-booze campaigns just don't seem to understand how to change people's attitudes)

Did you make that yourself? I make mine with Bombay Saphire Export Gin thats 47%

Damson Gin is just as good as well

I gave it a miss this year as I had something like 10 litres of it from previous years.

Back on topic they should put spirits up but only cheap ones. Putting money on Grey Goose won't do much

I don't drink... so there you go.

A cheap date!

Or are you into your designer soft drinks instead? Fentimans and that.

Answer carefully...

I don't drink often and I don't drink very much, although I do get drunk. Lightweight FTW.

Hasn't it been economically proven that putting booze prices up won't curb consumption?

Same here. I'm currently training myself not to continue drinking the day after a skinful, as this had led to a ridiculous pattern of 4- and 5-day binges. This month I've only had one night of boozing, so I'm doing alright!

I'm the same with regard to speed, too. In pubs, I'm nearly always getting up for my second pint as my friends are just taking their first swigs. It can get pretty embarrassing, especially when this is brought up as I'm being introduced to new folks, heh. It'd be nice to be able to go out "for a couple of pints" and actually leave it at that, and the savings would be pretty huge, so here's hoping we end up lightweights in time!

In my early twenties, I'd be out every Saturday, drinking to get drunk. These days I can't be doing with losing half a day or more trying to recover from a hangover, so I cut right back on the booze, drinking every couple of months or so. I tend not to keep wine in the house as it just gets drunk sooner rather than later. Mind you, I bought a bottle on Saturday and I've still got it - that's not bad going for me.

I've stopped getting hangovers, which is nice - but somewhat worrying.

asfish: no, shop bought, Gordons does me fine. I might try damson next time I pick a bottle up - I noticed it on shelves the other week.

No urge at all to drink this evening, because I feel like shit - I've not decided yet if it's caffeine withdrawal or todays venesection to blame. Or both. It's good, in a way.

This is the secret slogan of the Pipes and Ales committee, coincidentally.

Nah, I pretty much drink Pepsi and that's it.

I tend to be in the 'drink to get drunk' camp as well. Recently though Mrs B and I actually sat and talked about how much we drink (the conversation precipitated mostly by my being a very drunk prick, as opposed to just being very drunk, twice in quick succession around Christmas) and decided to try and cut it back. The pattern was to get smashed either on Friday or Saturday night almost by default if we had nothing else on and then spend the next day hungover to fuck in bed doing nothing at all. Weekend: gone! Now we're trying to plan to do something, even if it's just go shopping for stuff on Saturday afternoon followed by nice dinner somewhere, and have maybe four of five pints tops before calling it a night. As long as we make sure to eat before we start with the drinking it's actually a lot easier than I'd have thought and on Saturday night just there even dinner and films in the house saw me only having four bottles of beer and then leaving it at that. We still do get smashed now and again but the point is not to let it become our default reaction to a weekend with little else on as we were doing before. We do also go out for the odd Thursday night dinner-and-a-few-pints session but that was never really problematic because dinner in your belly plus the knowledge of work the next day meant no real desire to get totally wasted anyway. On those ocassions we tend to take a wander up to WEST beer hall as that means a walk plus dinner and a couple of pint and then a walk back into town which makes for a tidy evening. Also, the beer is excellent.

As for what we drink, we're both huge geeks for German wheat beer and have sampled shitloads of the stuff. As I sit here I can see beer mats from the beer halls for Fransizkaner, Paulaner, Weihenstephaner, Augustiner, Schneiderweisse and Erdinger (that last one from when we went to the actual town of Erding and stayed in the Erdinger hotel). The best one though was Andechs which is brewed by monks at the Andechs monastery just outside Munich. You get a train to Herrsching and then hike up the mountain through the forest to the monastery itself which has the biggest fucking beer garden I've ever seen (outside the Englischer Garten anyway). There you sit in the sunshine in the middle of all this countryside drinking some of the most delicious beer ever while eating barbecued pig and pretzels the size of your fucking head (see attached image). When we were there, in the addition to their usual beers, they were doing apple wheat beer (apfel-weisse) which was to die for. Seriously, anyone going to Munich when the weather's nice owes it to themself to make the trek as it's an excellent day out. Our eventual holy grail is to go to Bamberg which is a gorgeous looking Bavarian town (and Unesco heritage site) with a ludicrous number of pubs and breweries for it's size.

I'm currently trying to broaden my palate a bit as it can be problematic when going out with groups of people and you end up somewhere that doesn't do wheat beer. I'm getting into darker beers like porters and also IPAs and random shit that I haven't had for years (e.g. Newcastle Brown Ale, which is surprisingly tasty). The BrewDog bar is good for that because they don't sell anything that's not obscure and unusual; although also usually expensive and incredibly strong so we don't stay long. Pretty much anything by Williams Brothers is good stuff. I still totally cannot fucking stand cask style ales though and they seem too warm and too flat no matter how often I give them a go. If it's not cold and carbonated it can GTFF.

Pipes n Ales is the one time a year that I reunite with all my old student friends. It's a bit silly, since I can never remember anything about the day, so it's not a good way of catching up with old friends.

One thing Pete failed to mention in his post is some of the ridiculous traditions this pub crawl involves. It has incredibly strict time constraints with archaic (and unenforceable) punishments being liberally handed out, humiliating letters to be read out to various unfortunate bar staff, copious smoking of pipes and cigars (not recommended in February), toasts to woefully innappropriate people (e.g. My Dad, Peter Sutcliffe, Hitler) and the bellowing of our original song called "Stoke Your Briar".

It is an epic pub crawl and I fucking love it.

My drinking still affects the weekend, a bit too much on a Friday and I don't get up early for the market or we don't do much on a Saturday.

If it were not for my wife I would drink a 1-2 bottles of wine a night.

She clamped down on this and made me stop smoking, I still miss it though. If she goes away for the weekend first thing I buy is 10 Bensons and smoke them all.

I don't think that I would drink like this now, even if she left me tomorrow or something as I would fear the hangovers too much.

I still can't leave a bottle of wine until its gone, but I've stopped things like 2am finishes at the bar when I travel, and drinking so much I black out.

I hate waking up in the morning and the first thought is "fuck me what did I do last night"

I still make real prick of myself at times. I got so twatted last year at my cousins wedding that my mother had to take a full bottle of wine that I was drinking ( with no glass) off me. Then I threw this bag of sweets in my wifes face, there was no malice in this at all, I really really thought they were rose petals. I was just so pissed. She had to take me home and I had a drink related breakdown (crying etc) don't get like this very often thank fuck.

She was upset and I had to put up with the "disapointed in you" lecture from both parents.

To me, socialising is one of the best things you can do and the best place for it is the pub. Drinking just makes it all the more fun.

I know it sounds odd when the government are trying to cut down on boozing as a whole, but I can't help but think if more people drank in the pub instead of drinking cheap crates of lager at home, the world would be better. It makes me sad over how quiet my local gets these days. When I come to power, I'll drop duty in pubs and increase it in supermarkets.

And to those who don't like drinking in pubs, I can't help but think in you're in the wrong ones. Ever watch Early Doors, the BBC2 comedy set in a pub? I'd love to drink there...

It sounds like you'd like to change, asafish.

I get pretty sleepy when I'm drunk, unless it's a banging party or whatevs. Probably not as bad as Myp though, so I hear.

I can't drink beers all night, so switch to cocktails, or spirits with mixers. Or even wine. Sometimes all of them. Probably relatedly, I suffer from quite bad hangovers, and chunder fairly easily (not as badly as when I was younger though).

I like getting a drink-buzz and having way lower inhibitions, but rarely get so drunk I can't remember what I'm doing or are totally out of control. I also don't care too much for drinking by myself, and Lady T and I don't often drink at night when we're at home. Maybe we're a bit square. Don't smoke either.

Pretty much a social drinker, don't particularly like drinking to the point I feel unwell.

Don't drink too often these days due to mainly working weekends and evenings. But I tend to drink too much then feel ill the next day. Sometimes I manage to pace myself and feel ok the next day, but a year or so of hardly drinking after uni has ruined my tolerance for booze.

I rarely get proper drunk any more as I suffer from horrid hangovers, proper all-the-next-day monsters. However, when I do drink it tends to be a pint or two or a couple of whiskeys with a film or a book. My recent home-brew efforts have propably slightly increased the amount I drink, but reduced the amount I spend.

I drink to get drunk and it's not very often I do it, really. Maybe once a month. If I'm drinking at my own pace, I don't get horrendously drunk because I don't like not having any control and not remembering what the fuck happened the next day. That still happens on occasion, sometimes we'll go out with the express intention of getting slaughtered and drink the stupidest things, as quickly as possible or play drinking games.

I like being drunk, though. I don't think they could ever make it prohibitively expensive for me. And I'm a lightweight anyway, I'm drunk enough to have plenty of fun after about five vodkas so I like to keep at that level all night and then stop drinking altogether when we get to a club, usually.

That reminds me, I'll have to make minutes on a tiny notepad throughout so we can sort-of remember what's going on. Though of course there is the danger that that may become admissable as evidence.

My favourite harsh punishment meted out to... Fenton, was it? ... was to be 'cobwebbed by a horse'. Anyway, I'm going to try the crafty tactic of ordering the weaker beers throughout the day (3.5% ish) in a bid to survive.

And don't forget that it all begins with a glorious greasy spoon fry-up. Yum!

Oh, Jesus Christ.

Fenton!