drinking

How safe is that drink? Lift-off drinks…and their scary side

My Fellow Inebriates,

My dad drinks rocket-fuel coffee for breakfast. I’m talking five espresso shots in a mug with honey every morning, after which he asks himself if he should switch to decaf.

I usually miss this ritual because I don’t get up until later, but last night I didn’t manage to drag myself to bed and instead passed out on the couch, which made me easy prey for the kids, who pounced on me in the morning.

After an hour of their abuse I realized how exhausted I was—how mangy and straggly, how lacking in energy. My dad’s nuclear-strength coffee suddenly looked good, and what bear can resist honey?

Holy f&*#^*# crap, people!! What kind of voltage is my dad administering to himself? I needed a freaking defibrillator after drinking his coffee, and now I’m wondering if my dad isn’t secretly super-human.

Among all the mental fireworks, a lightbulb went off in my head—I could drink a lot more alcohol if I ingested caffeine along with it. With a caffeine boost I wouldn’t pass out so easily and I could take my alcoholism to a whole new level.

It’s not a new idea, of course. Combining uppers and downers is a way of life for many people, some of them deeply psychotic. A range of alcoholic products appeal to this niche market (as well as teenagers) by combining booze with ingredients such as caffeine, taurine, and guarana. Phusion Projects served up this magical combo for several years in its Four Loko product until it was banned in several states, prompting the company to rejig the recipe and ditch the stimulants. The FDA sent a warning letter to three other companies adding caffeine to booze, citing the beverages as a “public health concern.” Health Canada is even more emphatic about the dangers of combining alcohol and caffeine.

I feel deeply psychotic myself after sampling my dad’s coffee, and drinking alcohol strikes me as a natural curative. What’s the problem?

  • According to the FDA, “caffeine can mask some of the sensory cues individuals might normally rely on to determine their level of intoxication.” Cues such as passing out.
  • Teenagers comprise a huge market for energy drinks and gravitate naturally to the alcoholic variety when they’re loitering in the liquor store parking lot looking for someone to boot for them.
  • Last year 16 Canadians were hospitalized due to heart palpitations, seizures, and strokes brought on by energy drinks. Of the 79 adverse reaction reports filed, half were deemed serious and four life-threatening, plus there were two deaths. Nine cases involved alcohol, but which cases and what the impact of the combination was hasn’t been reported.
  • A Dalhousie University study shows that when students combine energy drinks and alcohol, they double their alcohol intake. Wow! That’s exactly the effect I was looking for when the lightbulb flashed this morning and my one or two neurons decided booze and stimulants were better than Fred and Ginger. Health Canada says no, LB, no!

It’s probably a good thing these combo drinks are off the market, because I would go ahead and drink them in massive quantities, and my little furry body would probably disintegrate.

Paul Chiasson, The Canadian Press

But in the certifiable absence of common sense, what’s to prevent me from buying some Red Bull and mixing it with alcohol? “Good taste,” says my mum, whose car window was once smashed by a hooligan who pitched a Red Bull at it from a moving vehicle. Pregnant and emotional, she stood wailing on the sidewalk beside the shattered glass, vowing hatred against Red Bull simply because the perp was long gone and she had no other target for her outrage.

Could I order the recipe at a bar?

It depends where you live. Some states have banned drinks like the Jägerbomb (Jägermeister and Red Bull), as have some areas of Australia. Canada classifies Red Bull, Monster, and Rockstar as foods and Jägermeister as alcohol, warning against the upper/downer mixture, but ultimately it’s up to the consumer—who usually turns out to be a young party animal whose cerebral cortex hasn’t developed the capacity for sober second thought. These are totally my people! But I don’t want to steer anybody toward bad choices. Personally, I don’t enjoy impulse control at all, so don’t heed my ideas. Here I defer to the government and advise picking either the energy drink or the booze.

You know which one I’ll pick.

CUTTHROAT PALE ALE—Arrrr!

My Fellow Inebriates,

Ordinarily I’d say you can’t watch too much Star Trek, but then you have bears like my friend Scary, who’s logged at least 10,000 hours watching every Trek iteration in addition to Stargate, Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, Andromeda plus every single other sci-fi program that every got green-lit for production. You could say Scary got sucked into another reality.

Scary used to lead a charmed life. Before his humans had kids they used to go to work every day. They’d leave Scary watching the Space Channel on a 50-inch plasma all day. They didn’t want him to be bored.

Then they had kids and suddenly the TV fell under new orders: Elmo, Sesame Street and Barney took over the screen, leaving Scary to wallow in his sudden secondary status and his sci-fi withdrawal. Feeling neglected, he became bitter, resentful, jaded. He became a dick.

With only his science fiction memories, Scary retreated into a dark world of apocalyptic fantasy and excessive snacking.

I invited him to join me in sampling Tree Brewing’s CUTTHROAT PALE ALE with me but he was too busy watching YouTube videos consisting of open sky shot in people’s backyards with some distorted (sometimes obviously modulated) audio behind—i.e., the strange sounds of 2012 that have gone viral recently.

Luckily, the lovely Christine and my somewhat less lovely parents were there to open the CUTTHROAT bottles.

I’d recently tasted THIRSTY BEAVER AMBER ALE, a delightful but more mainstream offering from Tree Brewing, so I was buzzing with anticipation and the usual alcoholic jitters. I realized I didn’t miss Scary’s company; with his End-of-Days mentality and general paranoia, he’s not the sort of guy you should take along on any sort of mind-altering odyssey. Although in lots of ways I share his fascination with the apocalypse, I don’t think it’s going to swoop in on a seven-headed dragon the way he does. Plus there was more beer for me and the humans without him.

Poured into the glass, CUTTHROAT PALE ALE is golden orange with a foamy head that dissipates quickly. Right away the aroma is intriguing: malty and grassy with suggestions of caramel and buttered bread. So the actual first sip is disconcerting—instead of the mellow, malty flavor I’d expect from a pale ale, CUTTHROAT jabs you with hops and an aggressive carbonation level that actually challenges the palate to reconcile its one-two-punchiness with the delectably gentle malt promised to the nose.

It’s kind of fisty that way really. Everything olfactory tells you you’re in for a soft, caramel-tinged sipper, and then CUTTHROAT yanks your arm up behind your back and says very threateningly, “Bend over!”

Because it’s really much more of a bitter than a pale ale. The hoppy profile would appeal tremendously to IPA fans as well as classic bitter drinkers. After a quick adjustment of expectations the hops are in fact delightfully clean and fresh, not to mention perfectly appropriate for the fizz level.

The finish is very dry and long. At first my impression was OMG, what was that? but halfway through the bottle I was smitten with CUTTHROAT and couldn’t possibly begrudge its take-no-prisoners assault on my tastebuds. It’s a fantastically violent beer that, in all honesty, Scary probably couldn’t have handled.

As Christine said approvingly, “It is called CUTTHROAT, after all.”

5 ways to help your anus thrive

My Fellow Inebriates,

Running out of alcohol feels like the end of the world, which—especially here in 2012—got me thinking about actual Armageddon.

How will it come when it comes?

Are we prepared? What does “prepared” even mean when we’re talking about wholesale annihilation?

Sobriety is a bitch but I have to admit it makes it easier to read Discover Magazine. I like the way Discover’s Phil Plait (Death from the Skies!) calculates the odds of each of ten flavors of cataclysm occurring. In a way it’s reassuring—in a way not. Then again, the only proper reassurance is a headful of booze to make his scary ideas go away.

But I’m going to deal with one of them today: asteroids.

Phil Plait calculates 700,000:1 odds of anyone dying from an asteroid impact. Those are vanishingly long odds, considering you have 18,000:1 odds of being murdered (and 2:1 odds of getting away with murder; consider that). Chances of a meteor crashing into your particular house? Try 182 trillion against. Chances of you getting hemorrhoids? You just need to be the lucky 1 in 25.

So it doesn’t make sense to worry about an asteroid slamming into the planet. Nobody used to fret about it, even with the 1908 Siberian event as a cautionary reminder that there’s an asteroid belt out there between Mars and Jupiter that slings the occasional city-size chunk at us. Plenty of asteroids have grazed us over the years, but we were blissfully ignorant. That or we realized our close call after the fact. Some of them, like the bus-size rock that glanced by us on Wednesday, would have disintegrated in the descent through our atmosphere. Others, such as 1,300-foot-long 2005 YU55, which whizzed within lunar distance last November, needed only a little English on their trajectories to take out entire cities.

Holy shit, how often does this happen?!

Well, it doesn’t occur nearly as often as painful hemorrhoidal itch does. Hemorrhoids are an absolute epidemic compared to asteroid hits. Worse still, your odds of getting hemorrhoids increase if you enjoy binge drinking. Tales of alcoholic woe abound:

  • …everytime i go out and party and drink alcohol in mass quantities at somepoint the hemorrhoids protrude. By the end of the night I feel them sticking out and the next day because of the irritation they tend to bleed…It only happens shen drinking alcohol. Help please!!
  • every time i have a drink the next day i see blood on the toilet bowl which is very scary…. i tried to quit drinking but its not that easy… i am only 22…. i was hoping to get surgery but i dont know yet…
  • it felt like as if there was something popping out, like as if i’m going to soil myself but it’s actually just the hemoorhoids getting bigger which makes me panic a bit…when my body temperature rises in a warm environment they start to get irritating…also when i drink alcohol they get worse and i’m running to and from the toilet a lot

Leaving aside the profound effect hemorrhoids seem to exert on spelling and punctuation, they do sound like a dreadful death knell for the party lifestyle. What are the wretched things anyway?

Also known as piles, hemorrhoids are painful lumps that result from excessive anal pressure. In addition to causing the ass to bleed, they interfere with comfortable pooing, and the unfortunate social stigma they carry often causes sufferers to avoid seeking medical attention or even purchasing soothing ointment. One of my mother’s friends was so embarrassed by his affliction that his hemorrhoids ran rampant until he finally shoplifted some Preparation H because he couldn’t face the drugstore cashier.

I should mention that he has an enviable liquor collection and rec-room bar. But is curtailing his drinking the only way to rid himself of the burning sensation of hemorrhoids?

Of course not—how silly that would be, and how intolerable. Here are some medical recommendations:

  1. Get some exercise. This would of course include grinding away at a dance club. (Did I mention my friend Julia Gale of Broker’s Gin recently injured her knee at such a discotheque, gyrating to Love Shack by the B-52s while her colleague Petronella looked on aghast? Julia, who described the injury as an “alcohol-fuelled” form of “self-expression” is going under the knife this week to repair the damage. This sounds infinitely worse than hemorrhoids, although of course the latter can eventuate in surgery too.)
  2. Eat fiber. This makes it easier to flush stool out of the rectum, alleviating anal pressure. Have your breakfast oatmeal with Jack Daniel’s instead of just having Jack Daniel’s.
  3. Drink plenty of water. This softens your poo, which also eases pressure on the anus. If you have hemorrhoids, it’s okay to water your scotch.
  4. Defecate regularly. I guess this means you need to make an effort instead of waiting for your business to slide out on its own.
  5. Avoid heavy lifting. This means modifying point #1 to exclude weightlifting. I’ve heard of compound exercises recruiting multiple muscle groups, but who knew the anus helped with your deadlift too?

And of course there are all sorts of other ways to strain the anus. You may have a favorite way, or even several favorites. The important thing is to realize that your anus needs a rest now and then. It is your friend and you mustn’t mistreat it.

But is alcohol necessarily contraindicated for hemorrhoid sufferers? Scientific reports conflict, besides which they are brain-numbingly full of numbers and terminology. I couldn’t make any sense of them at all, but they do conclude that alcohol’s contribution to hemorrhoids is dose-dependent. The upshot is that there’s a definite sweet spot when it comes to drinking—an amount that will allow you a few drinks yet permit your anus to thrive.

OMG, what amount is that? you may well ask. Sadly, I don’t have a clue. I don’t even have a functional anus, my friends.

But don’t envy me just yet, because there is a dark side to lacking an anal cavity.

It means my odds of getting hit by an asteroid are greater than my odds of getting hemorrhoids.

OMG!