The Battle of the Liquors: Fireball, Freshers and Free Shots

By Nayana Wallis-Patel

Liquid courage has a name, and its ethanol. If you removed it from alcoholic drinks, they would have virtually no effect on you – the liveliness, the need to pee and the urge to get a shawarma at 3am are all events that would almost be eradicated without it. However, for curing the next day’s banging headaches and fatigue; it’s not as straightforward. 

With Belfast Freshers Week 2024 selling out tickets roughly a month before, the likelihood of students waking up with hangovers has obviously increased in the last fortnight, as have the sales of monster energy drinks to cope with the latter. As for the rest of you, you’re probably wondering why one flatmate, who drank more, is better off than the other the morning after. 

Despite ethanol taking most of the fall for the frequent Wokamoley visits on nights-out, the blame for hangovers is majorly passed to substances called congeners. Commonly found in darker liquors and beers; whiskey, rum, and Guinness, than the clearer; vodka, gin and cider, congeners like methanol are naturally produced in the fermentation process alongside ethanol. But due to their smaller size, they tend to linger in the body, meaning the hangover recovery could take much longer (insert some horror hangovers regarding whiskey). So, if you’ve got a 9am the day after, science is telling you it’s probably better to go for white over red, vodka over rum and Smirnoff over Jack Daniels. 

Now we’ve got spirits out the way, ever thought your mixer order could play a part in your morning after? There’s a little controversy as to whether diet drinks are better than full sugar, but one thing’s for sure: the more carbonated your mixer, the quicker the alcohol absorption. Didn’t see that one coming, did you? Whilst there isn’t a significant drunkenness distinction between fizzy and non-fizzy mixers, if it means you’re less likely to be hungover, then why not switch the coke for a cordial? Bonus points if you add ice, can’t go wrong with some extra hydration (or crunch, if you’re one of the weirdos who likes to eat ice). Anyway, the biochemistry behind it all is this; the CO2 becomes best friends with the ethanol, which makes the trip down to the small intestine a lot smoother. The alcohol then beelines for the liver, then the bloodstream, finally diffusing into the brain, and before you know it, you’re singing ‘Unwritten’ at the top of your lungs standing on stage at Kremlin. 

Talking of clubbing, here’s some food for thought (or rather liquor for thought).

A British Medical Journal study done on 30,000 survey respondents, aged 18-34 from across 21 countries, investigated that age-old question of ‘does what you drink on a night-out matter?’. It found that consuming different alcoholic drinks significantly resulted in experiencing different emotions. For example, 52.8% of the respondents reported feeling relaxed with drinking spirits, but 29.8% reported that spirits made them feel more aggressive. Red wine came up on top as “Most Likely to Cause Tiredness” with 60.1% testifying, but spirits took the lead as the highest percentage of respondents with a boosted ego, with 42.4% recording that spirits “made them feel sexy” (yes, that is a direct quote from the results). Additionally, women were recorded to have “higher odds of feeling all emotions compared with men, except in feelings of aggression”, sound familiar? The countries with the highest association of feeling sexy were Colombia and Brazil – as per Shakira, their hips really don’t lie. If you’re a nerd, like me, you can read more on this study below [1]. 

To conclude, because I realise all our attention spans have been ruined by TikTok; “the darker the alcohol, the worse the hangover” isn’t just an old-wives tale, hydrate as much as you can, take care of yourself, and if in doubt, play Shakira.

Yours Sincerely,

Someone who doesn’t even drink.

Sources:

[1] Ashton, Kathryn,et al.2017. “Do Emotions Related to Alcohol Consumption Differ by Alcohol Type? An International Cross-Sectional Survey of Emotions Associated with Alcohol Consumption and Influence on Drink Choice in Different Settings.” British Medical Journal

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