How to Drink All Night Without Getting Drunk
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He is, however, brilliant. He gets beer and marketing beer better than anybody else I've ever met.
Unless you're the most famous brewer in the world -- then I suppose it might be easy to miss that sign.
I don't buy cheap beer, ever. Not even if I'm asked to get a case for a party. If I'm going to drink, I want something I'll enjoy. Cheap beer is about getting a buzz or getting drunk. It always freaks people out, "you shouldn't have spent so much for a party". Why? I don't see it as a choice. Should I have only opened a can of kidney beans for the dish I brought, too? No, I want to have something that I will enjoy, that others can enjoy, too. It's not just about "filling ourselves to the gills on as little money as possible." But that is how people treat beer.
That's not to say I don't get drunk sometimes. The experience of sitting in an innertube on a lazy river is significantly enhanced by alcohol. A wedding party is significantly enhanced by copious alchol. But most days I want to be productive and make things. I can't code or write well--and certainly can't solder at all--when I'm drunk. I similarly don't watch a lot of television, or read a lot of books. I'd like to fill my time with more productive tasks than consumptive ones.
I also find cheap American beer to be ideal for the beach.
Can't help but read your reply in a thick southern accent. Personally, if I'm aiming for an aggressive, high volume night, I'll take a busch over a bud.
New Belgium has Shift ( http://www.newbelgium.com/beer/detail.aspx?id=fc35795d-8d9d-... ) as a good session beer.
Fort Collins Brewery has a nice list of less hoppy beers:
http://www.fortcollinsbrewery.com/brews/red-banshee/
I like that I can still get the crazy IPAs, but there's a ton of other good stuff to drink too.
As to hops, for myself I do enjoy extremely hoppy beers, just not nearly as much as I enjoy less hoppy beers.
It's worth noting that the "appreciation" of fine beers, wines and spirits is often an excuse to inebriate while convincing oneself that it's actually a higher pursuit. The simple exercise of bifurcating products by price, and assuming that correlates with quality, is flawed.
Thinking through friends and peers, the ones who show the greatest specialization of their drink (only the finest vintages and best, small-brewer beers and long aged bourbon) are the ones who drink the most. But it is shrouded by a classy veneer.
I rarely drink more than one beer in a sitting. But if the only thing being offered is Budweiser or similar, it'll be zero. I don't take it to an extreme, and am perfectly happy with a Sam Adams or similar decent big names, but I'm not going to waste the calories on something awful.
It's not a matter of "a higher pursuit", just a matter of taste, no different from preferring to drink nothing than, say, Mountain Dew.
"Cheap beer is about getting a buzz or getting drunk."
Cheap and expensive beer are made with close to identical processes, with the same controls and outcomes. Often beers are "cheap" purely as a function of the scale of the operation, but they still use the same quality ingredients and processes.
People often buy cheap beer because they actually prefer it (just as many, many people prefer lighter beer, which is something that many of my Canadian countrymen can't understand), or because the taste differences are so small that they can't justify the extra expense.
When you find yourself in the position of differentiating yourself from those other people -- that your own drinking is more cultured and justified -- it's time to take a step back and seriously contemplate things, because it's almost always a cover.
You're right that tastes can vary. Some people do prefer the cheap stuff, somehow.
But you're applying a blatant double standard here. You're saying that we should realize that some people prefer the cheap stuff, and then simultaneously turning around and saying that "almost always" preferring the expensive stuff is a cover. No, it's just taste.
You have to decide: is it legitimate to prefer different kinds of beer, or is it a cover? If it's a cover, it has to work both ways. If it's not, then you can't accuse people who don't want to drink Miller Lite of being secret alcoholics just because they want something that costs more than 50 cents a can.
The guy who elevates himself above the hordes and their cheap beer, on the other hand...it isn't really about the product anymore.
cheap bear definitely does not have the same outcomes.
Some products aren't filtered as much. Some have different blends of ingredients. Some are fermented more or less. And so on. But those things seldom impact the actual price in any material fashion, instead are subjective choices of the brewer based upon their market.
Filtering is interesting, because at one point the premium products (in many categories -- beers, wines, coffee, etc) earned their position because they were filtered more, while the cheap swill of the masses where the slurry products full of bits and grinds. As filtering became mainstream and inexpensive, unfiltered and raw -- doing less -- became the sign of a premium product.
Unless you disagree that they for example replace a lot of the barley with rice and corn - I don't really see how can you claim it's the same thing.
"Unless you disagree that they for example replace a lot of the barley with rice and corn"
The ingredient lists of the "cheap" beers were, in most cases, set in the 1800s, and remain unchanged. And they were set when rice was much more expensive in the US. And indeed even today rice is neck and neck with barley -- they aren't saving a penny using rice. Instead it was used specifically because it gave a lighter taste, because, again and amazingly, this is a preference of many drinkers. Many Japanese beers are heavy on the rice, and are considered "premium" products for it.
The notions of expensive versus cheap as a patron of a brand are often completely detached from reality.
I come from a place where people will polish a 24 in a night. I have an appreciation for fine spirits, but I don't think that I "drink the most," and additionally, when I drink, it's more to enjoy the liquor, then get hammered (though, I do that, too). My appreciation comes from drinking a varied variety of beer, rather than just the same thing ad infinitum.
[W]hen I drink, it's more to enjoy the liquor than get hammered.
Hmmm . . . is it the former or the latter?
Jim Koch is able to function fairly well as an alcoholic that many people wouldn't be able to because of the industry he's in.
And as to your other comment, unfortunately, I'm all too familiar with alcoholism and its many forms. There's no such thing as "true alcoholism," there's just addiction.
Edit: Alcoholism isn't just drinking alcohol all of the time. It is a life threatening and often fatal disease. True alcoholics destroy their lives and the lives of everyone around them.
So downvote me all you want but people who have no experience with the powers of addiction should keep their petty labeling to themself.
The OP is making a blanket statement about a man he has apparently met a few times, and even states that he goes around to various other forums stating the same thing. In my opinion that is extremely rude.
People love to toss the term around lightly. If you've ever lived with a true alcoholic then you know it's not something to be joked about and it is a life threatening disease.
How would you feel if everyone in this thread was non-chalantly calling John Koch a junkie.
it's not something to be joked about
News flash: the fact that you know worse cases doesn't mean the less severe cases aren't bad and it doesn't mean that people calling out those cases are joking. Grandparent was saying Jim Koch is drinking in a way that has severe negative consequences for his long-term health.
There are a whole lot of people that are indeed functioning alcoholics: they don't drink themselves into a stupor, but they are constantly buzzed, which has long-term health consequences and impacts their effective personality and behavior in (usually) a bad way.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-functioning_alcoholic
High-functioning alcoholics... "Have difficulty viewing themselves as alcoholics because they do not fit the stereotypical image and because they feel their lives are manageable, [and] avoid recovery help."
Saying that people who are high-functioning are not real alcoholics is just going to make them even less likely to admit they have a problem and seek help.
Both types of alcoholism are important and trying to raise awareness of one by denying the other is not helpful to alcoholics of either type.
You are right there is definitely a wide range of addiction and I shouldn't have indicated there wasn't.
In retrospect it was really just an emotional response to the OP labeling Koch an alcoholic.
I lived in complete denial for 15 years before some of my HFA buddies started burning their lives down in rather spectacular ways.
I didn't want my life to serve as a warning to others, so I quit. Luckily, I didn't lose anything along the way, but many have, even many of the HFA's I used to know.
http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/20381/does-eatin...
http://prevention.gwu.edu/alcohol-absorption
http://microbewiki.kenyon.edu/index.php/Small_Intestine
Anyway, I can't see the utility of drinking without the expected effects.
Forgive me if I am missing something obvious, but isn't that outside the range of a typical stomach's pH range? If so, how does this study relate to the conditions inside a stomach? Im basing these questions on what I saw in that skeptic.exchange link posted above, again im a total layman.
Edit: Thanks for the answers, aroch! :)
Whether or not yeast would make it that far and then being to bud and produce ADH again, I couldn't really say. I never looked at human-ingestion of colonies.
ADH itself can be denatured in low pH environments but will renature and self-fold into an active tertiary structure when brought back to neutral/slightly basic pH.
Intact yeast cell membranes would be pretty capable of keeping ions out (thus some pH isolation), but I imagine they would be more permeable to small relatively uncharged substances as ethanol.
I see no immediate reason why not many of the yeast cell might act tiny bioreactors, keeping a somewhat controlled internal environment, where ethanol might diffuse in and be degraded. Can someone here think of any reason for why this would not be plausible?
The alcohol breakdown chain reaction in the body (I'm not a chemist) is ethanol -> acetaldehyde -> acetic acid. The ethanol causes your to be "drunk", but the acetaldehyde has some arguably worse effects (headache, tiredness, flush). Asians typically process ethanol -> acetaldehyde way faster than others, but the acetaldehyde -> acetic acid can be really slow. If the yeast is mimicking ADH and not ALDH, you're just going to suffer even more.
Again, I'm not a chemist or a doctor, but from my preliminary internet research and anecdotal testing (though I have quite a few different data points), Famotadine (OTC), and higher levels of APO-Ranitidine (can be prescription) seems to slow the rate of ethanol -> acetaldehyde, balancing out the drunkness effect more, and giving you more time to process the acetaldehyde -> acetic acid. I typically go from maxing out at 2 drinks / 3 hour period, to about 11 drinks / 3 hour period on Ranitidine, given favorable conditions. I've had lower levels of success with Famotadine.
NAC is a precursor to the antioxidant glutathione, which the liver uses during step 2 of the alcohol metabolization process (acetaldehyde > acetic acid). It helps by ensuring the stores of glutathione in your liver are less likely to become depleted when you've had a few drinks or more, thus reducing the buildup of acetaldehyde in your system.
Incidentally, it may also have some efficacy in terms of hangover reduction, even among those unaffected by alcohol-related flushing, due to the same mechanism.
I'm a doc. I believe it works but the side effects are too much for me.
It's likely that what you are taking may contain both, is this the case?
For all the bio-hackers looking to experiment tonight, it seems to make sense to:
1) take dry yeast to help the alcohol dehydrogenase break the alcohol down into acetaldehyde to stop you from feeling drunk
2) take both thiamine (optional) and cysteine to help the acetaldehyde dehydrogenase break acetaldehyde down into acetic acid to stop you from feeling hungover.
Assuming you just take a bunch of dry yeast, and that it has any effect at all you'll probably still have a bad hangover. Then again, chaining all these things together without a solid understanding about what's going on probably isn't too smart either.
I would note NAC does have a sulfhydryl group (as indicated by the -SH in the molecular diagram), so it does contain sulfur at some level.
And if hangover reduction is your goal, there are a number of other things that contribute to hangover symptoms that you also need to manage in order to reduce their effects:
- dehydration (drink a bunch of fluids before bed)
- depletion of electrolytes (generally speaking, make sure to eat/drink something salty)
- depletion of B vitamins (thiamine/B1 in particular tends to be depleted among alcoholics - supplement with a B complex high in thiamine; some studies show reduction of hangover symptoms with very high B6 intake(very high levels-1200mg) source: Khan MA, Jensen K, Krogh HJ. Alcohol-induced hangover. A double-blind comparison of pyritinol and placebo in preventing hangover symptoms)
http://www.reddit.com/r/Homebrewing/comments/23wbeo/jim_koch...
It may also be that he just paces better and has a higher tolerance than most. There can also be other "side effects" of downing 1 serving of yeast + yogurt per beer you plan to have so perhaps that helps limit his intake as well (if he sticks to the pre-plan), heck pre-planning probably helps more than anything.
- people who know him personally say he's wasted ALL the time
- mechanism of action is supposed to be ADH that is added to the bakers' yeast
- microbiologists and chemists doubt it's going to work
"To be honest, I think when we were talking to him, he was already few drinks in. But yes he is a very nice man, he was joking with us and stuff."
"Bartenders hate him"
If you manage to increase the concentration of alcohol in your stomach to levels when ADH2 kicks in (and keep sugar concentration low), it might work. But where is the fun in drinking without getting drunk?!
You need to get "into" it a little before you realize it actually does taste like beer, except without the alcohol, and how much part of the flavour alcohol actually is (even with the relatively low 5% ABV that most beers are).
Also, and this may differ per regulations where you are, but many "non-alcoholic" beers do in fact contain up to 0.5% alcohol (including the Erdinger Weizener). So you'd have to drink 10 of them to feel the buzz of one normal beer, but I'd expect by that time you'd be feeling something else, over the buzz from a single beer :-P
I wonder how much of your perception of the "awesome" flavor is skewed by the pleasurable effects of alcohol, though. Like, the more you drink, the happier you get, and the happier you are, the better everything tastes.
One question for chemists or biologists out there: If the byproduct of the yeast is acetaldehyde, wouldn't that cause the uncomfortable "Asian Flush"? (http://bsclarified.wordpress.com/2011/11/18/im-not-drunk-i-j...)
It doesn't surprise me that the tip doesn't appear to work (based on the links others have posted), because the article is really a (hopefully viral) marketing vehicle for Sam Adams - in a couple of short paragraphs, they touch on their glass, their new IPA, their social programs, their new Belgian quadruple, and some of their existing line.
It finishes up with some "secret", broadly dismisses established science (by stating that companies didn't pick up Prequel just because they didn't want some liability that they wouldn't have been liable for anyways), offers no real
What makes it interesting is that this article seems to resound with the more technical people that I know. It's like linkbait for smart people...
If you want a biological assistant, what you really want is to swallow the "mother of vinegar" acetobacter culture biofilm from unpasteurized, naturally fermented vinegar, and eat it with something dense and sugary before you drink. The acetobacters actually metabolize ethanol into acetic acid and survive in highly acidic environments such as the stomach. As they are aerobic bacteria, you will also need to swallow air while drinking. The amount of time that alcohol remains in your stomach makes it unlikely that you will make more than a tiny difference in the amount of alcohol that enters your bloodstream.
But it is much more scientifically plausible than baker's yeast.
An actual, significant reduction in drunkenness from ingested alcohol would have to overstock the liver with ADH1B, thiamine (vitamin B1), ALDH2, ACSS2, and n-acetyl-L-cysteine (Acetadote). This would require an intravenous injection before you start drinking, and is probably very dangerous in the absence of any real medical necessity.
I'd say the "hip trend" is (and has been) toward lactics/sours/reds and I don't think Sam Adams has anything invested in that yet.
I'm also wondering about how he deals with the inevitable farts? Yeasts eating sugars = gas which is why beer and everything else is fizzy.
If you drink them down fast, you'll get a buzz, and feel quite drunk after not many more. No matter what you do for the rest of the night, you'll be more drunk than usual for the number of drinks you've had.
If you drink the first 2-3 drinks slowly, you'll have one of those nights where you're not as drunk as you normally would be for the number of drinks you've had. Sure, if you drink a ton, you'll be drunk, but you won't be "wasted".
Tip: If you ever find yourself in some kind of drinking contest, have two beer before the contest even starts, but take 30-45 minutes to drink each beer. You won't be nearly as drunk later on.
Kind of like how a levy can hold back millions of litres of water hitting it… unless it all shows up at once, in which case it gets overwhelmed and all kinds of problems stem from there.
Based on what other people are saying here, my guess is, that's what we've got going on here. My common sense says there is probably a measurable, but insignificant effect by the enzyme in the yeast.
Edit: also, the theory is just that the stomach is a mixing bowl, so the poor man's field test is here is pretty trivial, maybe I'll have some fun tonight with a blender, some yeast, and a bottle of cheap hooch.
Come to think of it, this does sound good.
Why would you want to drink a bunch of alcohol and not get drunk? If not becoming drunk was the goal, why wouldn't you just, you know, drink something non-alcoholic?
Double-blind randomized control trial or it didn't happen
Anyone?
because alcohol _tastes_ good????
sort of like, how to smoke weed all night without getting high
um why??
And it's a widely-accepted objective fact that all of these listed food are in fact literally the best tasting foods of all things, ever.
Not all of them at the same time, mind.
Hell yes! As far as I'm concerned a great wine is probably among the most delicious things you can put in your mouth, with great whiskys, rums, cognacs and beers coming not far behind. Being able to drink as much as I want without any of the side effects would be a dream come true.
> Hell yes! As far as I'm concerned a great wine is probably among the most delicious things you can put in your mouth ...
Wait -- your answer doesn't even respond to the OP's question, which was whether alcohol tastes good. Alcohol (ethyl alcohol) has no taste. All the drinks you list could in principle be created without any alcohol content, and some of them are. Would you express the same enthusiasm for non-alcoholic equivalent drinks?
> Being able to drink as much as I want without any of the side effects would be a dream come true.
But most alcoholic drinks can be duplicated without any alcohol and taste exactly the same (because ... remember ... alcohol has no taste), so you can get what you say you want. What remains to be seen is whether you really want what you say.
But it does have a very distinct mouthfeel which is part of taste sensation. But mainly alcohol is very good a taking up the flavour compounds of anything you add to it. This is a really big factor in what makes alcoholic beverages distinct. Also the fermentation process breaks things down and releases flavour compounds from the thing fermenting in a way that is hard or impossible to get other ways.
But most alcoholic drinks can be duplicated without any alcohol and taste exactly the same
If this actually is the case, and I very much doubt it, why hasn't anyone done it? All non-alcoholic wines I've tested on the market today taste quite bad and bear only a passing resemblance to their alcoholic counterparts. If someone could make a non-alcoholic wine that could hold its own in a blind taste test against a collection of reasonable even just $20 bottles I'd be be beyond happy. I would probably even be willing to pay a premium over the cost of an equivalent bottle of alcoholic wine.
If its so easy as you claim it to be why are all current commercial efforts so incredibly far off the mark?
The important thing is to avoid the hangover.
Sometimes I'll go out to a bar and get absolutely shitfaced drunk (8 double G&Ts, for instance) and wake up the next morning feeling fine. I'll pour myself one drink at home before bed and wake up the next morning feeling like death.
A bit of energy exertion to walk to the bus stop and get home may have made all the difference.
Same as playing poker even if you're not very good at it, and know you're going to lose.
I already do!