–Christian

We’re heading over to a friend’s holiday house warming party tonight. Our contribution is going to be an old holiday favorite, bourbon milk punch. Lighter than eggnog, but still well-spiced and comforting on a cold night, bourbon milk is easy to prepare and makes a nice additional to any holiday spread.

You can mix to order, but more than likely you’re not looking to shake drinks all night. Which is where this great large-batch recipe from the New York Times comes in handy.

The ingredients

The Times recipe calls for the following to make eight servings:

12pts confectioner’s sugar (dissolves easier)
64pts whole milk (half gallon)
12pts bourbon
.5pt vanilla extract
Fresh grated nutmeg

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—Josey

There are two things we don’t think work better drunk here at the Alcohol Enthusiast, and driving is one of them. (The other one is your mom’s penis, in case you were wondering—heyo!) So I’ll preface this road trip list with a big “IF.” IF you can sober up long enough to drive someplace or you’re a really excellent liar who feigns a pitiable combination of congenital Strabismus and inability to operate your household’s only vehicle because it’s a stick shift person whose friends crave their company so deeply they offer to stay off the sauce for a few hours to drive you all somewhere super sweet for the weekend, here’s what you should bring to ensure a bitching time: Read more »

Our first happy hour event was a great success. After setting up at HANGR 16, I mixed drinks like crazy for almost three hours.
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—Prez

Ah, Vegas, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways… Of course, I can’t tell you exactly what happened on each trip, I was sworn to secrecy upon arrival at McCarran International Airport by a scruffy man who approached me in the men’s room and assured me that “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.” In retrospect, I probably should have told an adult, but hey, IT’S VEGAS!

Forget the family-friendly image Vegas has been trying to push lately; Sin City is all about indulging your vices. And mine happens to be over-enthusing to my heart’s content.  Sure, I’ll be the first to admit that Vegas is not for everyone, but every alcohol-blooded, booze fan should think of it as Mecca: a holy place that every Enthusiast should pilgrimage to at least once in their lifetime—preferably once a year.
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—Josey

All Enthusiasts know that happy hour is a lie.

Not the happy part—the hour part. While billed as a way to decompress with friends and co-workers at the end of a challenging work week—or to remind yourself that there are good things in this world in the midst of a hellacious one—for Enthusiasts, happy hour is simply a financially-savvy method of kicking off a drinking marathon. So how can an Enthusiast make the most of her Friday happy twelve hours?
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—Josey

You know when you’re halfway through a bottle of Kirkland Signature vodka and you get an empty, gnawing feeling in your gut? Occasionally, that’s not just last weekend’s regrettable (and documented) intercourse acts eating away at you, nor the bulk bottle of vodka getting 86′d from your system. Sometimes, that gnawing means you’re hungry. For food.

But while an oily slice of pepperoni swiped off your bar neighbor’s table while they’re getting another round, or a stale handful of Movie Theater Butter popcorn out of a yellow-stained bag perched atop your friend’s kitchen garbage will satisfy in a pinch, there are certain edibles that will really tickle your booze-drenched belly until in screams in joy.

With this new series, Food for Drunks, we aim to hunt down the world’s most Enthusiast-friendly provisions—and, enjoy the shit of out them.
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—Christian and Josey

Full disclosure: two of us here at Alcohol Enthusiast headquarters are married—to each other. Ok, ok—we get it. Stop making that fake gagging noise. Just hurry up and get drunker so you can be happy for us already.

When two Enthusiasts meet, blackout and forget that they met, then meet again and attribute their deja vu-esque recollection of one another to some sort of important past life connection, get wasted, fall in love, and decide at some point to make this most unholy and booze-soaked of unions legit—there are certain rules that must be followed in the planning of the wedding. Just as a Catholic wedding requires readings from both Testaments and a Psalm song, and Jewish grooms break glasses—a wedding between two (or more) Enthusiasts must also follow certain tenets of faith.
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—Christian

I know the Enthusiast has already expounded on the trials and tribulations of drinking in public, but today I’d like to talk about a different kind of outdoor drinking. Namely, that which is done in the modern cradle of mother nature—the campsite. Here is the Enthusiasts’ guide to camping, guaranteed to ensure that your next journey in the wild* does not involve even a bit of sobriety.

The first rule of thumb is: you’re always going to under estimate. Unless your friends are a bunch of teetotalers, the carefree atmosphere of hanging out under the open sky, combined with the lack of responsibility a single bar of service on your cell phone engenders, will almost assuredly result in the lot of you drinking constantly. As such, be sure to bring plenty of hooch, and the right combination is very important.
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Let’s travel back a couple years, and to a place its locals occasionally refer to as “San Diego.”

It was somebody who may or may not also write for this blog’s birthday, and he may or may not have been turning a year that was one shy of a quarter century. What better way to celebrate, he might have mulled, than crashing for a weekend at a friend’s home in California’s most stereotypically sun-filled of cities? A perfect venue for copious daytime-beach into nighttime-bar-hop booze binging.

The birthday eve began as many had before, with a promise among several present to ingest a certain number of drinks that equaled the years that this possible-future blogger was aging towards. Sharpies were located and stuffed in jean pockets, for keeping semi-permanent tally.

Twenty-four increasingly wavy, lengthy, and/or jagged lines snaked around the forearms of the participants’ arms before the clock ticked past three hours prior to West Coast last call. And the night, she was young yet.
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Am I seeing things, or is that tiger leering at that innocent vocalist?

Every Enthusiast knows that nothing—nothing—goes better with booze than music. Especially live music.

Sure, I might have made a similar statement about drinking and air travel in a previous post, and I meant that one, too. It’s just that I mean this one way, way more. And don’t you dare think this is the final, super-definitive statement about “nothing going better with alcohol than…” that you’ve heard out of this Enthusiast. After all, what goes better with enthusiasm than loudly proclaimed, sweeping generalizations and over-blown, oft-self-aggrandizing, defiantly definitive statements which are always forgotten entirely until sobriety returns, rearing its dehydrating, leg-muscle-spasm-causing, sinus-duct-pinching presence? (Hangover symptoms may vary.)

Many of us Enthusiasts have been on this rodeo circuit for many, many years, despite little restrictions like the “law” and, additionally and prior to that, our “parents” or “legal” “guardians” telling us that we had to be over 21 (or whatever your country of adolescence’s legal boozing age is) to ride this liquid freight train straight to Enthusiasmville.

Nothing could ever stop this Enthusiast, for one, from getting wasted before seeing all my favorite bands play live. We all liked a lot of what we now realize are hilariously bad bands as we trundled awkwardly through middle and high school, so I’ll spare myself the added shame and you the boring—the way that other people’s pictures of themselves in front of C-List tourist monuments are boring—deets. This blog is about alcohol enthusiasm, anyways.

Concerts meant long, sweaty lines of washed-out dyed green hair, and tattered, baggy black tee-shirts emblazoned with imposing logos and sharp, cracked white or raised silver lettering. And acne, and loosely-laced skate shoes. Then there were the shoulder-tap acquired plastic jugs of bottom-shelf, ice-clear liquid-panty-remover, poured gingerly into dumped-out and more discrete plastic water bottles that we could slyly swig from in line. All of this burning through our throats, and chased by M&Ms or crackers and the intense desire to get super wasted before it was our turn to get padded down by security on our way through the stadium and/or venue and/or pier gates. Enviously, we watched our elders lined up at beer-fueling stations, or aside long bars, ordering and receiving that which we’d only carried in with our bloodstreams. So cool with their big plastic branded cups and/or fancy little glasses with their fancy little twin straws. By the time your or my mom and/or dad arrived to collect the sweaty teenaged music lovers, splitting headaches and joy waltzed hand in hand into the blissful sunset of our fuzzy brains as we raced down highways, home.

Last night I got drunk at a fancier-then-I recall-from-being-a-tipsy-15-year-old venue in San Francisco. Pushing past crowds towards the wrist band line, where ID shares were exchanged for rights to buy pricey cocktails, I wondered—was this what I had lusted after, when secretly guzzling seared clear liquid from those plastic lips in preparation for lights up, ear-splitting, cheering, shoving, encore? These short, flimsy receptacles lousy with warming ice cubes, infused with the faintest splash of the essence of vodka or bourbon?

Maybe you just don’t know what you got, until it becomes wildly age inappropriate to participate in it.

And we flashed our IDs to have our wrists festooned with paper bracelets, and we pushed our way past heavily-perfumed, shot taking, bumpit-ponytailed women to swig that which we still and always, lust after.

 
—Josey

Tiger lusting after rock star photo courtesy of Easystreet.