What does ‘drunk’ mean to you?

What's your definition of being drunk? It’s a term I use often and casually but when does it trip over from being ‘not drunk’ into ‘drunk’? And how carefully should we use it?

Is it when we have an elevated sense of enjoyment? Is it when we’re laughing more, talking rubbish and offering to get the next round in? Is it when we stand and feel a little ‘woo’? Maybe when we realise that we’re beginning to slur words a little and everything is getting slower (except time which is speeding along)? Is it when we know we’ve had a few and that the next has to be the last? Is it when we leave the pub and stumble around, knocking into mates, lacking control? Is it when we sit on the train and the carriage starts to spin and we’re not entirely sure what’s going on? Is it when we’re throwing up somewhere or passed out?

I don’t know the answer to this one myself but I’m interested in what people class as drunk or not drunk and where on the spectrum of inebriation ‘drunk’ actually falls. Is it having had one too many or is it having had five too many? Are you ‘drunk’ when you reach your personal limit (what is this limit - a couple of pints or the point at which you can’t drink more without passing out) or is ‘being drunk’ a lot more than that? The dictionary says “being in a temporary state in which one’s physical and mental faculties are impaired by an excess of alcoholic drink; intoxicated” which leaves it open to debate.

And how carefully should we use the term ‘drunk’? Is it negative as if to suggest you’ve done something terribly wrong or is it a casual term? Does it all depend on the situation and the actions? What do you think?

This video (above) and this one shows some really drunk people. My favourite is the guy in the second video who is given the breathalyser test but thinks it’s a bottle and tries to drink from it!

I was absolutely wasted...

Here’s a question for everyone and it’s inspired by something Andy wrote in a post earlier this week. He said: “to put it bluntly I was bolloxed.” It’s not surprising given the list of beers he was drinking during the day, but the question is this: from a writer’s and a reader’s perspective, should we talk about being drunk in blogs?

Traditional beer journalism has worked hard to make beer a serious beverage up there with wine and whisky, breaking away from the binge-drinking statistics, so by getting completely hammered and then telling everyone about it, are we in fact doing more harm to beer than good? Or, is that just a side of beer drinking which now gets a chance to be written about honestly thanks to the diary format of beer blogs?

What do you think: is it good to read about someone being drunk (so long as they aren’t throwing up on trains and pissing in bins) or does it do a disservice to beer? What about discussing a raging hangover? A part of drinking we should talk about or not?

I also ask because I’ve mentioned it in a piece I’ve written for CAMRA’s Beer magazine and wonder what others think. I got the image from here.

@Sheffield, #twissup was awesome

Well that was fun. The pictures say it all (especially this one, although this is my favourite thanks to the hilarious caption). Take 30 people, a combination of bloggers, brewers and drinkers, mix them up inside three breweries and lots of pubs, soak in beer for up to 12 hours and it’s a good recipe for a cracking day.

Thornbridge and BrewDog lined the bar in the Sheffield Tap at midday (Black Dog is the best looking beer I’ve seen in ages); a pit stop in the Harlequin which broke up the long walk; a Kelham Island brewery tour where everyone was drinking Marble Brew No.14; to the current CAMRA Pub of the Year, the Kelham Island Tavern, for a Thornbridge Samhain; to the Sheffield Brewing Co, another tour, a couple of beers; to The Hillsborough Hotel, to a bar lined with Crown Brewery beers, a Marble, Thornbridge and a Pictish; the most to-the-point-brewery tour ever (that’s the mash tun, thanks); Ring of Fire 2009 being tapped; a tram and a bus to a sandwich eating competition and a pint of something from Abbeydale; back on the bus to the Devonshire Cat and a pub full of drunk people drinking Ruination and heading straight for just that; and onwards still, back to the Sheffield Tap, for more, and more; and then food, the missing ingredient of the night, some chicken things, chips and potatoes cooked in southern fried chicken batter; a taxi; a broken key; a shared bed; too-little sleep; the worst hangover ever experienced; a delicious breakfast that couldn’t be eaten as all focus was on controlling the body functions; and then to Leeds; a round of juice and tea in Wetherspoons; taxi to Avery at Beer Ritz; Rooster’s fantastic American IPA on cask got me back on track; a dizzying selection of bottles; bye to Zak, hi to North Bar, for cask, keg and bottles, for bread and fantastic cheese, for a Raging Bitch; then the best pint of Sam Smith’s OBB I’ve ever had; a quick Old Peculiar; another train; a couple of half pints in the Sheffield Tap; Burger King; a four hour train journey made into a five hour train journey by missing the connection by one minute; finally getting in and realising the text I sent to Lauren to tell her I’d be late didn’t actually send; unpack, sit down, pass out.

Damn it was a good time. I felt like hell all day yesterday but who cares, it was worth it. Sheffield is a seriously good place to drink seriously good beer (and if you go then stay at The Hillsborough Hotel, it’s a great place). Jaipur was my first and last of the weekend and just delicious; the Marble Brew No.14 was fantastic; Crown Pale Ale and Stannington Stout show how good a brewer Stu is and then his Ring of Fire blew me away with its green-chilli fruitiness (that was beer of the day); Ruination IPA was a glass of peaches and apricots that kicked my arse; bottles of Orval and geueze ended one day and left their wrath on the next.

A day spent drinking, talking about beer and enjoying it is always fun. Thank you to everyone who came, it was great to meet you or to see you again – I hope everyone had a brilliant day. Special thanks to Alex from All Beer for sorting us out a lot of extra treats and brewery tours and hurrying us along when we floundered. Now we just need to sort out the next one! So far we’ve had suggestions for Manchester (Tandleman, we’ll need a guide!), Oxford or Cambridge, Norwich, Derby, Newcastle (Jeff Pickthall offered to guide us around there), or even Belgium. Plus there’s GBBF, but that one’s a gimme. Where do you fancy going?!

Thanks to Matt for the photos. Check out the #twissup timeline too, it makes for fun and interesting reading! 

How Much Do You Drink?: Learning to Get Drunk, Temperance and Neo-Prohibition

How much do you drink? And, how often do you drink? These are questions I get asked a lot (usually by my mum). In light of the Neo-Prohibition series by Pete Brown (I’ve learnt a lot reading these in the last week) I wondered how much everyone actually drinks, when they drink and the way they drink.

My drinking habits are fairly routine. Friday and Saturday I’m on it and these are my dedicated beer days. Sunday is sometimes a few pints or bottles, sometimes dry. Monday to Wednesday I try to keep beer out and usually manage it. Thursday can go either way.

I try to have dry days as a way of balance; it’d probably be more sensible to spread the week’s worth of drinking out over the full week, but I feel more righteous not imbibing for a couple of days. On the drinking days, it’s usually a few pints or a few bottles if I’m at home. Sometimes it’s a lot more, but that’s quite rare – who actually enjoys the feeling of having too many? Not me.

I don’t think my drinking habits are unusual. I also don’t think they are unsafe because I know what I’m doing and I know my physical limits. When I was at university things were different. Every Friday night, without fail, we played monstrous drinking games. It was usually a crazy version of higher or lower where we ended up drinking ridiculous amounts of the cheapest gin and vodka. It was an organised, focussed attempt to get as drunk as possible. Then we went out and drank more in the student union. And we drank cheap rubbish - alcopops, spirits and mixers. That’s proper binge drinking. I’ve said it before, but it’s a mentality thing: drinking six shots of vodka to get drunk is different from drinking a bottle of wine at home to relax; one is a means to an end, the other is social and relaxing.

And we are, like most others, a nation of social drinkers. Social drinkers aren’t the problem here. It’s the ones who are anti-social with their drinking. Cheap deals on supermarket lager and three-for-one on shots mean that getting alcohol (getting drunk) is easy and very affordable but it’s no cheaper than a box of KFC and that’s equally ‘damaging’. As for anti-social drinking... that happens when your drinking directly affects someone else, physically or mentally (alcoholism, aggressive ‘social’ drinking).

Technically, whenever I choose to drink I binge, yet the thought never crosses my mind that I might be doing wrong. I think the unit scale is only relevant if people are driving, and even then it’s not an exact science. You see, I personally don’t care whether I consume 2 units or 20 units. It’s like worrying about 100 calories or 1000 calories. It’s not about the ‘label’ of units, it’s about the thought process behind the consumption and the mentality of it (plus, have you ever heard someone sitting in the pub saying, ‘no more for me, I’ve reached my four units for the day’?).

What do the government want to do? Is a temperance movement gaining pace? Will a pint soon cost £7? The trouble is, it’s not about the product but it’s how it’s used: use a car sensibly and everything is ok, use it stupidly and people get hurt. Before we can drive we have to take lessons and tests to prove that we are capable of driving. Drinking should be an education too, learning respect, how to act responsibly and the serious consequences (because, there’s no ignoring it, the consequences are serious). Scare-mongering is telling a one-sided point of view; education is about forming balanced opinions. Mark at Real Ale Reviews talks about the PR spin on things and that’s what it is: a quick cosmetic procedure that looks effective to a lot of people in a short amount of time. But it’s cosmetic and doesn’t fix the real, underlying problems.

Neo-prohibition is an easy and quick tick in a big government box; educating the nation is a difficult tick. Some people are terrible and unsafe drivers; some people are unsafe drinkers. Some people does not mean all people.

So out of interest, how much do you drink and when do you drink? Do you think you are unsafe and do you try and balance things out with good diet and exercise? Everything in moderation, so they say.

I found the picture by googling ‘drunk’. Most of the others, oddly, were of Paris Hilton.

If beer didn’t make you drunk…

I was walking to the pub (FYI: check out that link to see what beers are on this week - that's a wicked line-up!) a while ago with Pete and his brother, David, and the discussion turned to this horribly obese chap who had a (mythically?!) super-efficient liver that enabled him to drink gallons of beer every night and not feel any effect (except, of course, that his 20+ pints contributed to his already-monstrous girth). This then turned to a musing along the lines of: would you like to be able to drink and drink and drink and never get drunk?

So that’s the question: would you enjoy beer as much as you do if it didn’t come with the drunkenness?

I’m not saying the falling around, slurring, loss of motor controls and all that, I’m more interested in the stages from the first beer, through relaxing, into the merriness. You know how it is, a few beers in, where you talk shit, laugh more, feel happier; that fug of warmth and belonging and relaxation. And this isn’t about getting drunk, per se, it’s more about that 'beer feeling’.

This can probably be separated into further questions: would you prefer drinking if you can go all night and never get pissed? Given a choice between never getting drunk no matter how much you throw down, or getting drunk after one beer, which would you prefer? How important to your enjoyment is the whole inebriation process? What do you think...