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March 28, 2024, 05:45:35 PM

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Dry January [split topic]

Started by Ferris, January 02, 2019, 04:20:05 AM

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NoSleep

Quote from: Chollis on February 01, 2019, 04:13:50 PM
I've just been given a bottle of organic, sans sulphur wine which my friend insists doesn't give you a hangover. Obviously that's impossible, but it'd be great if it gave even slightly less of a hangover and didn't taste like shit. Anyone tried it? Too good to be true right?

If you drink enough of anything you'll get a hangover. But there are different kinds of hangover dependent on the quality of the booze. A decently distilled spirit (generally the more expensive kind, but there are a few bargains out there) will give you a "clean" hangover; you'll just feel a bit vague. Cheap & nasty booze will also add the headache and sickness on top of the vagueness. The ill effects come from fusel oils, which are compounds similar to alcohol that also get produced in the fermentation process, so they are naturally present in beers and wines. In distilled spirits the ideal is to reduce the amount of fusel oils as these can actually become deadly in higher concentrations (hence why distilling is controlled). Cheaper spirits tend to have a higher count of fusel oils, hence the nastier hangovers.

wooders1978

Hangovers occur generally because alcohol dehydrates you I reckon - you defo can do damage limitation by eliminating other toxins though

Ferris

Made it through with 3 lapses, and only 1 where I drank more than 3 small beers. That's alright.

gmoney

Quote from: NoSleep on February 01, 2019, 08:23:50 PM
If you drink enough of anything you'll get a hangover. But there are different kinds of hangover dependent on the quality of the booze. A decently distilled spirit (generally the more expensive kind, but there are a few bargains out there) will give you a "clean" hangover; you'll just feel a bit vague. Cheap & nasty booze will also add the headache and sickness on top of the vagueness. The ill effects come from fusel oils, which are compounds similar to alcohol that also get produced in the fermentation process, so they are naturally present in beers and wines. In distilled spirits the ideal is to reduce the amount of fusel oils as these can actually become deadly in higher concentrations (hence why distilling is controlled). Cheaper spirits tend to have a higher count of fusel oils, hence the nastier hangovers.

This was never my experience as a heavy drinker. My formula was this: if I drank a booze for a few months the more I drank the less it gave me a hangover. The quality of booze had absolutely no bearing. I drank Strongbow most often so this gave me the least hangover, hardly at all in fact. If I drank single malt whiskey for the first time in a long time I'd feel terrible. One of the worst hangovers I ever had was after a night drinking very expensive gin.

NoSleep

Quote from: gmoney on February 01, 2019, 08:46:13 PM
My formula was this: if I drank a booze for a few months the more I drank the less it gave me a hangover.

This is probably another factor, as you build a tolerance to the particular mixture in that brand.

Quote from: gmoney on February 01, 2019, 08:46:13 PM
The quality of booze had absolutely no bearing. I drank Strongbow most often so this gave me the least hangover, hardly at all in fact. If I drank single malt whiskey for the first time in a long time I'd feel terrible. One of the worst hangovers I ever had was after a night drinking very expensive gin.

Strongbow is probably one of the better cheap boozes as cider is exempt from the same tax as other booze (hence its bang for the buck).

The way to test what I mean would be to compare, say, a night on a quantity of cheap brandy compared to a night on the same quantity of Remy Martin.

As I said, some cheap boozes are fine. I always used to look for the cheap good ones. For instance Lidl's Queen Margot scotch (£11.49) is pain-free and cheap, compared to Teachers or Bells (who buys this shit?)

There are certainly different types of hangover as well as different kinds of buzzes from various boozes, which suggests to me those other compounds have similar effects to the alcohol (as well as modifying the hangover).

A really good test of what I'm talking about would be to drink a quantity of Stolichnaya vodka, but I'm not sure if it's the same quality as it once was in Soviet times (I'm pretty much a non-drinker these days so haven't had any Stoli for years).