gin

Why lemon gin won’t quench your thirst (YOUR thirst)

How many of you are furry all over?

If your ass looks like this in a thong, today’s heat probably felt at least 10° higher than actual temperature.

I love summer, but not because it’s hot. I love the summer drinks, and today I’m thinking gin-and-lemonade—Gin-Ade (Gin-Aid, if you ever consider sponsoring a charity show to raise money for the LBHQ gin supply). Surely Gin-Ade will supply all the refreshment and hydration a hairy bear needs.

But apparently doctors say not.

According to Robert H. Shmerling, who has considerably more letters after his name than yours truly, even though a cold alcoholic bevy may sound refreshing, it’s not the wisest choice to quench thirst.

OMG, why??!

When you’re active in on a hot day, you lose water and salt, which has side effects*:

  • Lowered blood pressure
  • Muscle cramps
  • Dizziness
  • Tiredness
  • Lowered muscle function

For bears like me, no problemo. Bring on the gin. But for you guys these things can be bad, especially if you lose more water than salt. This makes blood vessels constrict, increasing cramps and prompting the brain to send a chemical messenger (anti-diuretic hormone, or ADH) instructing the kidneys to conserve water.

In tandem with this, the brain’s thirst center kicks in, so you drink more. If you’re sensible, you reach for some H2O. If you’re a hirsute, thong-wearing bear, you belly up to the bar for another Gin-Ade.

So…good, right? Either way, you’re taking in fluids and therefore rehydrating. Wrong, according to Dr. Shrmerling. Those smart ADH instructions your brain sent to your kidneys to conserve water—well, alcohol inhibits those instructions. Your kidneys release water instead of holding onto it, and next thing you know you’re taking six consecutive trips to the pissoir where you crack comments like, “You can only rent a beer—*hic*.”

So your poor dehydrated body can’t hang on to the water it needs. And get you—you’re so pissed that not only does your ADH turn off; so does your judgment, and you order another round. And when you’re fully pissed, you have no idea how thirsty you are.

Throughout all this, of course, you feel increasingly clever and attractive and generally scintillating to everyone. If no one disabuses you of these notions (and perhaps if they do), you drink more, chasing the dragon that is your own magical charisma. You’ve screwed up, friend, and you won’t realize it till tomorrow, when you wake up dry-mouthed with a thong on your head.

Drinking on a hot day can start a spiral into dangerous dehydration. If you’re lucky and you don’t venture into epic excess, you’ll just end up with a wicked hangover. But keep an eye on those dehydration symptoms, or your Gin-Ade bender could eventuate in much worse.

As for Gin-Aid, let’s make it happen! Watch this space for more info.

* Luckily I don’t have blood, muscles, brains, etc. Not even genitals, I suspect.

 

 

GORDON’S LONDON DRY GIN—Gin that tastes like gin

My Fellow Inebriates,

The house got turned upside down this morning in a search for this.

It was the umpteenth search for a teeny Chihuahua whose owner keeps stuffing it into small spaces and then freaking out when it’s AWOL for bedtime.

By the time Chihuahua was finally discovered in the car, it felt like gin-and-tonic time. And, while my mum informed me 10:30am was too early (arbitrary on her part, wouldn’t you say?) she did agree to break out the GORDON’S LONDON DRY GIN again this evening.

The $12.69 mickey in our freezer represents another infidelity to BROKER’S GIN and by extension its lovely Business Development Manager Julia Gale, a woman who once savaged her knee busting out on a dance floor to Love Shack by the B52s.

I know (I think?) I promised Julia I’d wait for her delicious gin to be reinstalled at our government booze store, but I’m not made of stone.*

It all started with BEEFEATER 24, a purportedly higher-end version of the famously juniperous BEEFEATER marketed as a tea-infused homage to the founder’s dad’s penchant for that beverage—but really a cagey gimmick to gain market share by offering options within its own brand. When I espied the new BEEFEATER variety I was briefly blinded by it and forgot that I was holding out for BROKER’S. But BEEFEATER 24, while enjoyable, is a bit of a departure from traditional gin, so it felt like a miss (in retrospect). A couple of weeks after it was finished, I told my mother we needed some normal gin so I could feel better—both about my breach of trust with Julia and about my delirium tremens—but she said no. She said we need to keep our booze spending down to a dull roar.

Luckily my mother is weak-willed; as soon as the thermometer surpassed 30° she relented and started considering gin of her own accord. But only a mickey! (For tasting purposes.)

Thus rationed, I requested GORDON’S because it struck me as a good baseline, standard-issue gin. Chances are, every other gin-based cocktail you’ve ordered at a bar has been made with Gordon’s; it has the widest reach of any gin. I really felt (Julia) that it would be quite an omission if I didn’t procure some.

GORDON’S isn’t the cheapest gin on the shelf but it’s one of only two available (in my hood) in a plastic mickey. This makes it fantastic for lurching around a parking lot with—a distinction it shares with the bottom-shelf Canadian gin GILBEY’S, which is the cheapest, and which my parents won’t let me review unless I manage to procure a free sample.

The last time my aging parents bought a mickey, they probably did so to spike a punch. That’s how weird the purchase felt, they said, although I think they were just bitching about taking “bear requests.”

Soooo…

  • GORDON’S LONDON DRY GIN—check
  • Plastic 375mL bottle—awesome
  • $12.69 price tag—almost as good as it gets
  • Limes—check
  • Superstore house brand tonic water—check
  • Expectations—low to middling

Little did we know last night how much of today would be devoted to hunting a three-inch Chihuahua. I think we should have had four ounces apiece, but we settled for two in tall tumblers with lots of ice.

Ahhhhhhhh!!!!

Not bad, not bad. Especially considering the slight weirdness of our BEEFEATER 24 experience (although not as weird as HENDRICK’S). GORDON’S serves up exactly what’s needed in a decent G&T. Good infusion, good balance—more than serviceable and thoroughly underrated by gin snobs. It is, after all, the world’s best-selling gin.

But it’s not for gin noobs! GORDON’S hits all the traditional gin notes, and it hits them hard. If you’re looking for a gin that doesn’t really taste like gin, GORDON’S is not for you. If you don’t really like the taste of gin, there’s a whole shelf of gins crafted for you, with bizarro tasting notes like “cucumber” and “nothing.” If all the bottles came to life after the liquor store went dark at night, GORDON’S would kick the shit out of those pretty gin bottles. And maybe BROKER’S would help it if it was ever reinstated in the store.

I know, I know, it’s silly to anthropomorphize the gin bottles. Next thing you know I’ll be imagining Chihuahua is a real dog.

* NEW MATERIAL ONLY. POLYESTER FIBRES. PLASTIC BEADS.

Can we really trust the sun not to cook us?

My Fellow Inebriates,

The whole family went out last night. My parents had been in a funk all day; the kids were glued to Netflix and needed to be torn away somehow; and my dad had a restaurant gift card—so off they went without so much as considering letting me ride along in a purse.

When you’re left home alone with bears like Scary and Fluffy, apocalyptic thoughts are unavoidable, especially when you’re already feeling left out of an adventure. Scary doesn’t ever really stop thinking about the End of Days, and with a catatonic golem like Fluffy constantly beside him creeping everybody out, his weird-ass theories gain a little more purchase than they should.

Why Scary thought of solar flares when it was pouring outside I don’t know. He usually gets anxious about the sun in hot weather, when he’s cooking inside his fur. With his great ass in front of the turbo fan, he blasts us all with his filthy funk and his insights about Armageddon, which, when the mercury’s over 95°, tend to involve the sun.

Not that Scary’s insights are conventional. Ask him about global warming and he’s likely to shrug. Ask him about rising sea levels and he might yawn. Insufficiently dramatic for Scary, these ordinary perils fail to pique his interest. And despite the apparent stability of our sun, midway through its life with a good 4 billion years left in the tank, Scary wonders if it plans to start behaving erratically in 2012.

Photo: Casey Reed/NASA

There is some galactic precedent. In 1999 astronomers discovered explosive superflares had erupted from nine stars “disturbingly similar to our own sun,” all at least 100 light years away. Unlike regular solar flares, from which our atmosphere and magnetic field largely protect us, superflares are millions of times more powerful, brightening their stars by at least 20%, stripping planetary atmospheres (if any) and frying any inhabitants.

Bradley Schaefer, one of the scientists on the team, emphasized that “our sun does not do this, as far as we can tell.”

Scary scoffed at this reassurance, saying “It only needs to do it once. And then we wouldn’t be here to say it doesn’t do it.” He said the flares (“death flares”) could flash-fry distant Pluto, never mind us.

Throughout this Fluffy remained expressionless, a silent twin to Scary as he freaked me out, people. I thought I’d better contact someone with better credentials than Scary—maybe Bradley Schaefer.

Not one scientist or politician has ever responded to my emails. Truly, the only “official” person who gives me the time of day is Julia Gale of BROKER’S GIN. Just this week she sent a very slick newsletter full of pictures of the BROKER’S GIN tour of North America, which I do hope culminates in the reinstatement of that breathtaking elixir to our shelves. It’s just dreadful to think that if one of Scary’s death flares shot out from the sun all the gin would be instantly evaporated (along with our eyeballs).

I have to believe (and who knows, maybe Julia will agree with me; I emailed her about it too) that our sun will behave itself, although, being middle-aged like my parents, it conceivably will do something erratic. According to Sallie Baliunas at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, stars like our sun often dim down by 1% or so for a “quiescent” spell. Baliunas says 17 of Earth’s last 19 major cold episodes involved solar activity, so maybe Scarybear should think about that.

Maybe if we had an ice age Scary wouldn’t plunk his hairy butt in front of the fan and pollute the house with his funk.