I’m not a huge drinker. People always talk about getting different kinds of drunk on different kinds of alcohol. To your body, isn’t alcohol just alcohol? Sure, proof would matter, but does your body know the difference beyond that?
In: Biology
There are other plant derived active substances in beer, wine and every other beverage. Alcohol is the same but theres different amount of it.
Most alcohol that goes through your body is ethanol. However, in different beverages, you get minor components called fusel alcohols, which belong to a larger class of chemicals called congeners. These types of alcohols aren’t ethanol, but include alcohols like 2-methyl-2-butanol (2M2B, quite psychoactive, or other amyl alcohols), isopropyl alcohol, or 2-phenylethanol.
These alcohols do exert some effect, and may contribute to slight variations in how you feel with different alcoholic beverages. For example, you might’ve heard that some people tend to get more aggressive on darker beverages such as dark rum or whiskey. This is one explanation.
For instance, isopropyl alcohol is psychoactive in its own right. It has sedative effects of its own, is roughly twice as toxic as ethanol IIRC, and tends to only affect the GABA receptors rather than a myriad of receptors like ethanol does. In addition, its metabolite acetone is also psychoactive.
Edit: [Here’s a nice source](https://m.psychonautwiki.org/wiki/Comparison_of_psychoactive_alcohols_in_alcoholic_drinks) that runs through the most common fusel alcohols.
Yes alcohol is alcohol but drinks often have other things in them e.g. some have a higher sugar content than others, which might impact how you feel / react physiologically.
However “mixing drinks” leading to a worse hangover is a myth – it’s just that mixing drinks is correlated to nights when people drink more alcohol in general.
While what others say about the chemical composition of drinks being slightly different is true, this isn’t actually a very significant effect. Your main intuition that the body doesn’t really know the difference anyway is correct.
But people interpret situations differently and behave differently on different occasions – even without alcohol. For example,e when getting drunk on beer it was likely just a relaxed fun evening with some close friends, this will influence your behaviour when drunk much more than the type of alcohol. When people get drunk on tequila on the other hand, they probably set out to party hard and get drunk -leading to wildly different behaviour.
It isn’t so much the type of alcohol we drink but what mood we were in before getting drunk. It influences our choice of drink as well as our behavior when drunk.
Generally there is no difference just because it’s a different drink. Now there are exceptions if you’re drink contains another drug in it (like copious amounts of caffiene) but if we’re just talking alchohol, it’s the same.
What can be different, is the correlation of when and how you drink those different drinks.
As an example, when I drink beer, it’s ussually slow and steady. A single “Tall Boy” can will ussually last me 2 hours or so and I normally just have one. The result, not much if any buzz.
That said, if I’ve had a rough day and sit back to some nice whiskey, It’s ussually a 3-4 ounce pour and will get sipped over an hour and I might have two or in some rare cases three drinks. There’s a big difference there in terms of the rate of consumption, the total amount consumed and my mood when consuming it.
Turn to something like Tequilla, and it’s something I’m going to ussually drink once a year, at a special occasion, with friends when we are already pumped up. It’s going down as shots and ussually far too many of them. Again, rate of consumption, total consumption and the mood I’m already in is different.
The biggest impact on what “type” of drunk you get is your mood, and generally speaking different types of alcohol are often consumed under different circumstances. It’s also important to remember that all of the stories you’ve heard about “different kinds of drunk” are entirely anecdotal. Sure, varying concentrations will determine *how quickly* you get drunk, along with whether or not you drink on an empty stomach, drink quickly vs. more slowly, and so on, but ultimately, a BAC of 0.2 is a BAC of 0.2, regardless of the source.
Shots and mixed drinks are typically consumed quickly in a more lively, more upbeat (think ‘party’) atmosphere, so people that get drunk in those atmospheres are typically in a mood to be wild, excitable, or spontaneous. As a result, people often describe shots as leading to a wild kind of drunk.
Wine, by comparison, is more often consumed in a relaxed setting, so it’s often described by people as being a more soothing, relaxed, or ‘calming’ drunkedness, often associated with feeling sluggish or sleepy.
Beer tends to vary, since it’s a broader drink that is consumed at both ends of the extremes I gave above. People that drink beer at sporting events or parties will describe getting wild and crazy when they get drunk, while people that drink it with a meal or while relaxing at TV will often describe it helping the relax or unwind.
TL;DR – The “kind of drunk” you get from alcohol has to do with the mood and environment in which you consume it rather than the source of the alcohol itself.
The amount of water and sugar (and other stuff) will change how it effects you. For example I was drinking whiskey one night and realised I was getting thirsty because I wasn’t getting enough water.
And yeah you will feel different if you get a big dose of alcohol at once to if you drank it slower.
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In this case, people are associating certain drinks with the ease they can put them away. People getting “fucked up” on tequila, etc. are really just saying “I like the taste of this mixed drink, and the social situation where I drink it, so I tend to drink more, faster”
It’s just ethanol, anyone who says otherwise is completely wrong. A few people here are stating things like subtypes of alcohol and different mixers, this is complete and utter nonsense as the psychoactive properties are negligible in the quantities consumed (other than ethanol). The only somewhat caveat to that is that doing drinks with sugar in them can make you less drunk and low blood sugar can make you feel much more drunk.
The real reason is that people typically choose what they are drinking based off of their mood
Bad day = Whiskey
Party Funtime = Tequila
“Lets get ripped brah” = “lets mix Jaegar, Fireball and jetfuel and butt chug it”….then the next morning they say, “fireball makes me act crazy”
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