Booze Stories part 1: Peach Schnapps, Tequila and me.

Who likes tequila? Who doesn’t like tequila? It will come as no surprise to people who know me that I do like it. Have you ever heard though, someone say, “I used to like tequila/gin/vodka until one day I drank too much and was sick. Now the smell of it makes me feel ill”? I think that’s a common story. With me though, it’s not hard liquor like tequila, gin or vodka; it’s Peach schnapps. 

 Back when I was 18, and living in Newcastle University’s Henderson Hall, my friends and I embarked on a period of drinking tequila – we put our usual 8 cans of Viborg on hold for a few weeks. Each Friday night, before heading out to the Student’s Union, we’d sit in someone’s room, one bottle of Jose Cuervo between two (I think they were 70cl in those days. Now they’re only 50cl), drinking until it was gone. I wouldn’t notice how drunk I was until I had to return to my room to fetch my coat, barrelling down 5 flights of stairs, up 4, then those 4 down again and the other 5 back up, bouncing off walls and giggling all the way. Such fun.

The booze porn at the top of the page there represents what the bottle looked like back then. It doesn’t look like that now.

I think we tried tequila slammers, then we tried necking a shot and biting a slice of lemon, but pretty soon I switched to drinking it straight. I’ve always had sensitive teeth, and after biting those lemons it was three days before I could eat anything of note. Not that I ate a lot in those days. If you still aren’t keen on straight tequila, believe me, you do start to like the taste after a while. As an added bonus, drinking it straight made people think I was hardcore.

Anyway, this continued for a while until one week our group won a bottle of Archers Peach Schnapps [insert a photo] at the pub quiz. We elected to save it until Friday night, and add it to our Friday night drinking routine.

Now, I wasn’t much of a drinker before I went to university, but clearly by the time we’d started drinking tequila I’d done enough training to be able to handle half a bottle in an hour or so. Clearly though, that was my limit, since my seventh of a bottle of peach schnapps was enough to tip me over the edge. I didn’t make it out that night. And instead of marvelling at how the effects of tequila didn’t seem to take effect until I stood up to go out… I couldn’t stand up (or go out), and spent about an hour sat in a doorway, watching the world spin round and round. 

Eventually a couple of people helped me to my room and went out without me. I was sober by 1 o’ clock that morning, wide awake and bored. I think the next morning I was supposed to go and get a tattoo, but unlike me, my friend Jon had made it out to the Student's Union, and was still hungover, so we didn't go, and I never did get round to getting that tattoo. 

The essence of nausea and peach schnapps lingered for quite a while, and left a psychological imprint that I’ve never quite shaken off. So I’ve never been able to touch it since. No one seems to like that stuff, mind.

How about you though? Do you like Peach Schnapps? What’s your Excess Induced Alcohol Aversion, and is there a story behind it?

That’s all from me for now. I should be back on Friday with the usual pre-weekend post, and there might even be another article. Until then though, enjoy yer booze and see you later.

Plans for the weekend : Special Brew

Last night, while watching Sean Lock’s Lockipaedia, in which he talks about being able to buy Special Brew in his local pretol station, my fiancée and I realised neither of us had ever tried Special Brew. 

It isn’t liquor as such, but Special Brew does have a bit of a reputation for being a favourite among alcoholics (read: tramps), due to its alcohol content of 9%. In fact, while looking for booze porn to illustrate this post I came across the following link:

http://gk007a0336.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/carls.htm

Yes, there appears to be a website dedicated to super strength lagers (though it seems to have died in 2008)… with an actual serious review. What caught my attention more though, was this – a link to a review of Lynx Altra:

http://gk007a0336.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/lynx.htm

And suddenly I knew where this post was going. It was only supposed to be a brief description of what I might be doing this weekend.

Lynx Altra is probably the only super strength lager I’ve ever tried, and it takes me right back to my days as a student at Newcastle University. Not because I drank a lot of it – in fact I only ever had one 4 pack – but because it was probably the final link in a chain that leads me to recall a number of mad events.

The chain begins with my first year at Henderson Hall where as skint students (me more skint than any of the rest – I survived on £20 a week back then), we discovered Viborg lager (below is literally the best picture of it that I can find online). It was available just down the road, and I’m pretty sure you could get 8 cans for £2.50 (something daft like that). Like all lager, it was fine when it was cold, but when it was warm it tasted like vomit. And unfortunately, most of us didn’t have access to fridges, so what we’d do was fill our sinks with tap water and store the cans in there. It didn’t do much good though  – how is room temperature water supposed to keep cans at anything other than room temperature?

Despite its failings, every Friday evening (usually around or before 6) we’d all rock up at a friend’s room with a carrier bag of 8 cans of Viborg each (or however many were left in the bag at that point – each person probably had an open one in his other hand), and we’d drink all 8 before heading out to the Students’ Union.

Later, when we moved out of halls Viborg wasn’t available anywhere nearby, but luckily we found a suitable, and almost as inexpensive substitute - Lynx, which looked like this:

Again, this is the best photo I could find of it.

Lynx came in a number of varieties, but most accessible, and the one we favoured was this 5% version – 0.5% stronger than the Viborg.

I came to try the super strength Altra version one Halloween when a large group of us had spent the whole afternoon crawling the pubs in the Quayside area (as we often did), and had decided to go to a party. Needing to pick up beers on the way, we called into a newsagent where I spotted the Lynx Altra, and noticed it was an 8.5% take on the popular drink. I had to try it.

I can’t say I enjoyed the taste, but I did drink all 4 on top of the skin full I’d already had, and would go on to have a few more drinks. I seem to remember we all got thrown out of that party – in ones and twos, and a friend and I ended up in a nearby pub where the barmen were dressed as IRA terrorists with guns and balaclavas. Or they were robbing the place. They served us drinks anyway.

It was a great night. Thanks, super strength lager. So, with the spirit of 1998 in mind, I’ll be heading to the local Tesco after work to see about picking up some Special Brew. And if they don’t have it, perhaps the Best One will. Then I guess there’s always the petrol station.

I guess, to give you a bit of notice, next weekend is the Winter Ales Festival in Manchester (http://nwaf.org.uk/) where hundreds of people will go to get hammered, and a few will go to celebrate and promote real ale. I don’t think I’m going to be able to go this year unfortunately, but you never know.

Whatever you do this weekend, drink sensibly and especially don’t go around starting any fights, y’hear?