I’ve never had a drop of alcohol and never really wanted to try it but last week I turned 21 years old and I thought maybe it was time to try it.
To provide some context, I am not a ‘party person,’ I hardly ever consume unhealthy things, I go to the gym regularly and I track the foods I eat every day down to the proteins, carbohydrates and fat count.
I recognize that I am not the sort of college student to buy alcohol, but I still thought this would be a fun experience.
The first thing I tried was a Modelo Especial lager, a Pilsner-style beer brewed in Mexico.
Part of me was hoping to like it because it’s one of the alcoholic beverages that is meant to taste good and doesn’t have high alcohol content.
The average beer has around 4-8%, according to a Sunrise House Treatment Center webpage.
It tasted like sparkling water and left a slight aftertaste of the actual beer, which has a sort of bitter, sour taste.
If you’ve ever had beer bread, beer has the slightest aftertaste of that flavor.
I finally understand why it’s impressive to be able to chug an entire can or bottle of beer; I always thought it was just the alcohol having too strong of a taste.
At the risk of sounding like an idiot, I didn’t realize that beer is carbonated, so after my first sip I was left bamboozled.
After I had the Modelo beer, I tried my first hard alcohol with two different kinds of rum, Captain Morgan’s spiced rum and pineapple rum.
Rum is kind of a random choice, but that’s all that my parents had for me to try, and I wasn’t going to buy any more.
I tried a swig of both and didn’t expect to like either one of the rums which I didn’t, but the warm sensation in my throat was kind of exhilarating.
My parents told me that rum sometimes gets combined with soda, so I tried mixing Diet Dr. Pepper with a tiny pour into a cup of each rum and they both tasted a bit better.
Shortly after the rum, I drank some Oja! Syrah wine which is a dry red wine, according to Million Wines.
I was hoping I would like wine because there are so many different kinds of wine you can try, but I did not.
I hated Oja! because it tasted like what I imagine wax tastes like, and I don’t think wax would taste any good.
Maybe it was just that specific brand of wine, but I knew from the second that it touched my lips that it was terrible.
I tried both a Smirnoff Ice Original Malt Beverage and a Mike’s Hard Lemonade and these were the best-tasting drinks I had since trying alcohol.
They tasted pretty similar to Sprite, but with a slight alcoholic taste.
These drinks won’t get you drunk very quickly, as they have around the same alcohol content as beer (about 5%), but the tradeoff for the taste is that you’re not getting wasted.
If there is any kind of alcohol that is good for social drinking, these two are among the best because it tastes good and it doesn’t instantaneously get you drunk.
A few days later, I tried Blue Moon Ale and this was my favorite drink apart from the Smirnoff Ice and Mike’s Hard Lemonade.
Ale tastes similar to the Modelo lager I had, but I think it tastes slightly better compared to the Modelo I tried.
I knocked back three ales in about 30 minutes, and while I didn’t really know what it felt like to be fully drunk yet, I think that was at least close to being it.
Maybe I would feel very drunk after four or five beers, but three was enough for me to feel something, which is around the amount it takes to get the average person to start feeling the effects of alcohol, according to Rosewood Recovery.
However, most of everything I drank wasn't so good that I’d want to have it again. I’d rather just have some regular old soda instead because it just tastes better.
People drink soda primarily because it tastes good, but this isn’t always the case when it comes to alcohol.
Most of the time, they do it because of the funny feeling they get when they drink enough of it.
I must say that the feeling you get when you’re buzzed is pretty awesome, it’s like being on cloud nine without having accomplished anything in particular.
However, this is really the only reason that it may be worth it to drink, at least for me.
Partying with alcohol and getting good and drunk is fun, to be sure, but at almost any other time, I’d be fine with drinking soda.
