Tuesday, November 07, 2006

Booze news you can use

Whatever your political leanings, tonight will almost certainly be cause for celebration or lamentation. Champagne glasses will be raised in triumph, and bourbon will be slugged in bitter defeat. According to the NYT, if you're gonna be drinking tonight, you might feel better in the morning if you nix the cheap brandy in favor of some high quality vodka. Snip:
Experts say that the type of alcohol you drink does make a difference, but for various reasons. Among the most important is the amount of congeners (pronounced CON-juh-nurz) — complex organic molecules, like methanol — in a particular drink. Impurities in poorly refined spirits like cheap vodka can also play a role, but congeners, which are common in darker liquors, seem to have the greatest effect.

According to one report in The British Medical Journal, which looked at the effects of different types of alcohol, the drink that produced the most hangover symptoms was brandy, followed by red wine, rum, whiskey, white wine, gin and vodka. Another study showed that bourbon was twice as likely to cause sickness as the same amount of vodka.

I voted this morning and hope to find some way to forget the whole deal until tomorrow morning. As a moderate lib, I'd like to see control of the House shift, but I've got no illusions about what little impact that would have on the issues that matter to me. It just means that we return to being a country where it's hard to change the law, which is how it ought to be.

2 comments:

mdmhvonpa said...

The law of vodka ... Pays to be russian I suppose.

Charles-A. Rovira said...

My old man used to work for Seagram's Distillery and I learned all about fusel oils.

He used to moan and bitch about them.

Then he gave up his job and started to work as marketing manager at Merck, Sharpe and Dhome. (Man I'm fuckin' o-l-d. They merged back in the mid-sixties.) :-)