Does Heineken leave you ho-hum this holiday season? Sick of shiraz on Santa's lap? Has winter drinking socked you with a hangover and nothing to show for your imbibing efforts?
Well, if you're an alcoholic, there's not much we can do to help. But if you're just looking for a few ways to invigorate your inebriation celebration, here are five tipsy tips you can try this December:
Miracle Berry Fruit Tablets: As crazy as they sound, they're for real. Pop one of these dehydrated tablets on your tongue, and once it dissolves, you've got about one hour of flavor-bending fun. Anything you eat that's sour and bitter will taste sweet. Grapefruits will taste like pixie sticks, cheese will taste like frosting, and so on. For booze, the fun can be endless: a stout beer tastes like a chocolate milkshake. Cheap tequila tastes like lemonade. Dry wine tastes like Manischewitz -- not that that's a good thing. The results are temporary, and the berries are natural and safe -- the powder derived from a molecule called miraculin. Some hipsters are even throwing flavor-bending parties, but you can tell them you read it here first.
Wine and liquor aging accelerators: Too cheap, lazy or poor to buy vintage booze? Then science might just have a product for you. You can find a number of aging accelerators online that use magnets to dramatically speed up the fermentation process of wine, whiskey, scotch or tequila. Allegedly, these devices replicate the Earth's magnetic field, but at a much faster rate, allowing crappy alcohol to taste like vintage liquor in anywhere from 10 seconds to 30 minutes. While we can't vouch for whether it really works, several aficionados say they notice a difference -- though it's easy to accidentally overdo it. Right now on Amazon.com, you can buy the Shooter Buddy for $30 or the Vintage Express Aging Accelerator for $70 and find out for yourself if it's a scam or legit.
Vitamin cocktail to cure hangovers: Sure, you could just drink less, or stop mixing beer, cocktails and shots all night. Or, you could figure out what causes hangovers and try to combat them with vitamins and over-the-counter products. We won't get all Mr. Wizard on your nauseous, groggy ass, but here's your best shot at feeling reasonably good the day after a bender. First, drink a ton of water before bed, but preferably something with electrolytes, like Glaceau SmartWater or Whole Foods' generic equivalent. Then, along with your ibuprofen or naproxen of choice, go to bed with the following supplements: Vitamin B, magnesium, potassium, cysteine and prickly pear extract. Repeat in the morning. The later two are available in health food stores, with cysteine being the more interesting. It counteracts the poisonous effects of acetaldehyde, which is the major byproduct of alcohol metabolism and is responsible for most of the negative aftereffects and long-term damage associated with alcohol use. Cysteine supports the next step in metabolism, which turns acetaldehyde into the relatively harmless acetic acid. And check this out: cysteine can be found in eggs, which may be one of the reason drunks crave Webb's breakfast after bar time. As for prickly pear, otherwise known as opuntia, it might have a reducing effect on alcohol hangovers by inhibiting the production of inflammatory mediators. Studies have yielded differing results, with some tests witnessing significant reductions in nausea, dry mouth and loss of appetite, as well as less risk of a severe hangover. Or, you could just drink less.
Brewing your own beer and wine: Making homebrew or fermenting wine is slow, complicated, expensive to start and frequently tastes nowhere as good as what you buy in the store. The process can get messy, slightly explosive or turn your product into vinegar in the blink of an eye. That said, it's pretty fun, too. And once you plunk down the $80 or so to get started, the ingredients are cheap. If you have the patience to make it past your first batch (and with wine, that could be a year after you start), you'll probably get the hang of it and have lots of presents to dole out this holiday season. The good news is that there's no chance you'll go blind or kill yourself in the process. Of course, if you're feeling risky, there are lots of online resources for making vodka or rum at home. Proceed at your own risk.
Buzz Buddy iPhone app and breathalyzer: Finally, if you're not so good at remembering what you've consumed during a little holiday revelry, the Buzz Buddy iPhone app keeps track and gives you an estimated blood alcohol content as you go. For 99 cents, you get a tool that asks you to enter your weight and gender, then you just tap on the beer, wine, mixed and shots icons -- and Buzz Buddy does the rest. It tracks the time between drinks and charts your "progress" as you go. Warning, this gets pretty annoying, for both you and your friends at a bar. Of course, if you want to take things to another level, you can buy a breathalyzer on eBay for about $50-70. We've used them, and they seem to be accurate enough, allegedly conforming to DOT and FDA standards. But with their incessant beeping, these are seriously annoying in a bar, and like the Buzz Buddy, would make for a useless defense if you got pulled over. A better bet is to use a designated driver.
Andy is the president, publisher and founder of OnMilwaukee. He returned to Milwaukee in 1996 after living on the East Coast for nine years, where he wrote for The Dallas Morning News Washington Bureau and worked in the White House Office of Communications. He was also Associate Editor of The GW Hatchet, his college newspaper at The George Washington University.
Before launching OnMilwaukee.com in 1998 at age 23, he worked in public relations for two Milwaukee firms, most of the time daydreaming about starting his own publication.
Hobbies include running when he finds the time, fixing the rust on his '75 MGB, mowing the lawn at his cottage in the Northwoods, and making an annual pilgrimage to Phoenix for Brewers Spring Training.
