Beer Edition — Kozlowski: High-quality alcohol encourages moderate drinking

Most college students choose their alcohol using two… Most college students choose their alcohol using two criteria: cheapness and volume.

The first criterion enables the second — the cheaper the booze, the more you can obtain. Unfortunately, this mentality is self-reinforcing. If every keg party serves some kind of vile “beer,” you begin to think that’s what alcohol really tastes like. There’s no opportunity to discriminate between better and worse stuff.

More importantly, drinking those large quantities of alcohol can adversely affect your health and relationships. Consequences can range from car accidents to unplanned pregnancy to cirrhosis.

Of course, the prohibitionist view of beer as “demon rum” is equally wrong-headed. Alcohol can make conversation flow more freely and is thus a valuable social lubricant. Some of the best conversations I remember occurred after a glass of wine. And let’s face it, being buzzed is fun. The key is using alcohol in moderation. Right around the age of 21 is the best time to learn this skill. It’s legal to drink, meaning that there’s no need to guzzle as much alcohol as possible before getting caught,  and you’re still young enough to learn responsible habits.

A major way to encourage drinking in moderation is to choose high-quality alcohol. Now, I don’t want to sound like one of those annoying wine drinkers who will not consume anything that’s fermented after the Carter administration or the hipster who drinks only those beers which are made in three-bottle batches. I’m also not going to say that expensive stuff should be the only stuff one drinks, especially not when I just had a glass of Charles Shaw. But good alcohol changes one’s perspective on how the substance should be used.

Generally, good stuff is expensive. This is not to say that the only good alcohol is expensive or that more expensive necessarily means better. But, in general, the higher cost associated with better booze can discourage heavy drinking. Better wine and spirits also make the statement “I’m drinking it for the taste” make sense: It’s good enough to not be the kind of thing you would want to slam down.

Given a reasonably good wine or spirit, the drinker does not want to get drunk as quickly as possible, as doing so diminishes the overall experience. When drinking better drinks, the objective of the drinker changes to enjoying each sip and wishing that drunkenness did not occur. This shift in mindset is harder to achieve when drinking inferior beer, wine or liquor. In fact, the only reason for drinking some of the worse stuff is to get drunk. So if bad stuff is all one drinks, one can be excused for thinking that’s the only purpose of drinking.

A good wine, and, more importantly, a good wine pairing, also allows one to start seeing the consumption of alcohol as part of a larger experience instead of merely an end in itself. I have had maybe two formal dinners featuring an aperitif before dinner followed by wine during and a different wine at dessert, with the three drinks spaced out across two or three hours. A few other dinner planners have skipped the dessert wine, but the overall idea was the same. Sounds a little old-fashioned, if not effete, doesn’t it?

Well, sort of. But that still doesn’t detract from one central fact: Those dinners were some of the most pleasant I’ve ever had. Good wine pairings have a nice way of complementing the food, like ketchup has a way of complementing french fries. Much like too much ketchup ruins the experience of french fries, too much wine ruins the experience of dinner.

It’s also helpful to drink in the occasional formal setting. Having too much to drink in front of your in-laws at a restaurant is embarrassing. Spilling liquor on your suit jacket is equally gauche and will run up the dry-cleaning bill. Keeping tabs on alcohol consumption is a good way of getting to know one’s limits and training oneself to walk that fine line between buzzed and blitzed. If one decides to drink too much, it will be a conscious decision rather than a failure to understand limitations.

Of course, it’s still possible to drink fancier stuff and end up like F. Scott Fitzgerald or William Faulkner. However, I get the sense that if a lot of college students were to start drinking better alcohol, their outlook on drinking — its costs, its benefits and its function — would change in a way that would encourage moderation and responsible use.

Write kozthought@gmail.com.