Comment by Steve44 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Steve44 | Hacker News Reader

One thing I've not seen mentioned in this thread is the enjoyment you can get from the wide expanse of flavours & mouthfeels of different alcoholic drinks. Most of the comments seem to be focussed on people drinking either to help with social anxiety or just to blot the world out, or as one poster put it "to dissociate with reality".

I really love exploring different drinks, mainly beers and spirits although I do still enjoy some wine. There is such a wide array available, it's a wonderful 'hobby'.

With cask beers you get the initial mouthfeel of what I think is the live yeast coupled with some natural carbonation; it's not at all like a gassy fizzy drink more like a gentle tingling over the mouth. Some beers then deliver 10-30 seconds of different malt flavours with some being very biscuity or others more chocolaty. There can then the several waves of hops coming over depending how it's brewed. With one mouthful you get to enjoy and savour all those flavours and textures for a good minute with a lingering taste lasting much longer, they ebb and flow like a roller-coaster.

Spirits and cocktails are the same, the depths of flavours can be absolutely wonderful. A well balanced Negroni for example can be a very complex drink.

I've found some alcohol free drinks than can be built up to be a little interesting, but nothing comes close for the expanse and depth. I presume that the alcohol is volatile and is a key part of driving the other flavours, perhaps in a similar way to salt is a flavour enhancer.

I drink alcohol because I enjoy the taste. I am now in the middle of "researching" different scotch from different parts of Scotland. Each scotch is very different from the other one. Last year I was "researching" beers.

Pretty sure you just enjoy the buzz. Stop drinking for 12 months and see if you still really like the taste.

I do have a counter anecdote here. I mostly gave up alcohol years ago for health reasons (I was never a "heavy" drinker but did enjoy it regularly) and I greatly miss the things the parent poster describes.

Once in a blue moon (at special events and such) I will drink an alcoholic beverage again, and while there are some I don't miss (like a Pilsner beer or Vodka) there are others I really do enjoy for their own sake (a particularly aromatic gin, an aged whisky, or an IPA).

The compromise I have is that I allow myself to enjoy these beverages sometimes on rare occasions, but in small quantities. Maybe 4 oz of beer, or 1 oz of liquor. If they were available without the negative health consequences or the intoxication effect, I would very much enjoy tasting them more frequently.

I posit you are particularly susceptible to the neurophysiological effects elicited by phytochemicals and other psychoactives in those specific beverages.

This may be simply due to genetics — maybe you have an under- or overactive neurotransmitter-metabolising enzyme oslt which is temporarily remediated by those drinks in a fashion which produces euphoria — but may also be mediated by diet, medications and even life experiences.

My experience has been that if I adjust my diet to remove all carbs, which is close to the diet that human beings evolved on, then any alcoholic beverage tastes like poison to me and the hangover comes on faster. The buzz is also worse -- just woozy and sick feeling. Once you clean up your diet you'll lose your taste for alcohol. Your body really can't tolerate alcohol in any amount and once you've eliminated the other junk in your diet and have a pure system then you'll notice how miserable alcohol makes you feel and how terrible it tastes.

If you go on any exclusion diet then I'd expect foods you're no longer accustomed to would affect you. I suspect that if a committed vegan were to eat a steak then they would have a variety of both mental and biological reactions.

Regarding your comment about removing carbs being the diet we evolved with, I always presumed that we had always eaten fruit and vegetables. Grains didn't become a significant part of our diet though until about 4,000 years ago with the introduction of bronze age agriculture.

There also seems to be what appears fairly solid evidence that animals, including humans, have sought out fermented fruit, about 1-3% alcohol, for millions of years. Wouldn't that be something we evolved on too?

I'm sure ancient humans ate fruit from time to time, but there are a few factors to consider:

1. ancient fruit was much different than modern fruit, which has been bred over a millennium to be larger, have fewer seeds, more sugar, etc. Ancient fruit would have been small, sour seedy stuff with lots rind compared to what we think of as fruit today.

2. ancient fruit would not only have been extremely seasonal (just a couple of months a year, and only then if you lived in the tropics) but humans would have had to compete with monkeys and parrots and squirrels and insects and scores of other animals to get the fruit -- and the monkeys and parrots would probably have the advantage...

3. the caloric return on eating fruit is not that great -- the alternative back in the ancient days was to kill one of the mega fauna (all of which humans drove to extinction because they hunted so much). One wooly mammoth contains enough calories to feed a large tribe for the better part of a year. In fact, anthropologists have noted that the remains of Home Erectus are universally found in conjunction with mammoth bones -- they apparently lived on nothing but mammoth for a million years.

4. ancient humans lived through ice ages -- they survived through a period roughly 30,000 to 20,000 years ago (Last Glacial Maximum) in which glaciers were a mile deep over what is currently Manhattan. All of Canada was covered in ice -- and yet the Inuit lived there for thousands of years through that ice age -- hundreds of generations. Obviously these people weren't eating any fruit while living on a glacier. Even today there are people groups who live in the far north, such as the Sami, who are almost exclusively carnivorous. In fact there are several know human populations that have been almost entirely carnivorous, such as the Maasai, who live off meat, blood, and milk, and the Comanche, who lived off nothing but Bison.

5. Fruit is almost entirely fiber and carbs, both of which can be entirely removed from the human diet without any negative consequence. I expect that ancient humans were absolute masters of their environments and understood the plant life around them extraordinarily well, but I expect that they lived by the dictum that "animals are food and plants are medicine". They would likely consume plants not for nourishment, but for some other effect.

I had absolutely no issues with a fine tasting scotch on <20g carbs (i.e. just accidental carbs from what's in the veggies I ate.

That is ridiculous. Alcohol tastes like poison. It does not in any way enhance the flavor of any beverage. Small dilute amounts just are less noticable.

I disagree that it does not enhance the flavours, it is quite a significant factor IMHO.

Regarding it tasting like poison, I can't really comment on that other than to say I would think many people have a similar initial reaction to coffee or chilli for example. They bombard the senses and until you attune yourself in to them can be quite overwhelming.

Depends on what you mean by "taste". Technically, spicy foods wouldn't taste any different if the spice chemical capsaicin were removed from it. And yet many people prefer spicy foods.

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