Alcohol DOUBLES LIFESPAN, helps resist stress Pour yourself another one, quickly, as scientists have proven that alcohol can double life-span. Moderate levels of alcohol delivered an increase in longevity among test subjects in a recent study that Steven Clarke, UCLA professor of chemistry and biochemistry and senior author on a study published yesterday in the journal …
As a yank, on my first trip to the UK I was quite excited to try a few English brews that'd been so harped on about. In the pubs I visited, the tap labels would include the ABV - very informative. After three or four pubs, the strongest drink I'd seen on tap? Budweiser, at 5%. Typical ABV's ranged from 3% - 4.5% (higher end for stronger ciders). Talk about disappointment.
A typical decent beer in the US usually has about 5-8% ABV. The < 5% range is dominated by dinner-in-a-bottle porters and Sam Adams Lager. Budweiser, with Miller and Coors, are the crappy beers we export - American mass marketing at its finest. Most of our good beers are seldom exported out of the state, even more rarely out of the general region. The best I've had came from Washington and Oregon, but have had some good brews in various parts of New England as well. I'm not so well-traveled as to be able to speak much for other states.
If you can recommend me to some decent, common beers at greater than the piddling 5% ABV of the piss we export, I'm all ears - I'm likely to end up in Southampton again in the not-too-distant future. (I'm partial to ales, particularly IPAs, but will try anything once.)
There's a lot of rather silly digging at American beer on the spurious grounds that it's weak. Truth is, it's not particularly weak. It's just that the export versions, at least, taste like industrially produced piss. But that's an effect of their recipe and manufacturing processes, not their alcohol content.
Good beer is not distinguished by its alcohol content. A beer can be perfectly delicious at 4% or less ABV. A beer with more than 7% is probably trying too hard, in my view; anyone drinking it should seriously consider if their needs might not be better served, either by a glass of wine, or a bottle of meths.
Beer in Australia was in the 4.6-4.9% for many many years.
Then the government decided to stick a tax step at >4.0% which lead to many of the mainstream brewers to drop the alcohol content down to so they had to pay less tax.
These days I've taken to drinking wine because the beer in Australia is either overpriced, shitty pisswater or extremely expensive boutique stuff from microbreweries in tiny 330ML bottles.
$60 bucks for a slab of beer? Welcome to the "lucky" country.
Next time you're in Birmingham try the Wellington - a few pints of Coastal Erosion Dark at 8% should have the desired sliding under the table effect., there'll be a few dotted around the southwest that also sell this stuff.
Failing that Fraserburgh outfit Brewdog sell Tactical Nuclear Penguin in all of its 32% liver pickling goodness.
LC
You're likely to get a decent pint of Ringwood Old Thumper. Also, since Fuller's bought Gales you'll get a nice pint of ESB if you go into a Fuller's pub. From a bottle you can get some lovely strong ales of which I have just devoured a Morland "Old Crafty Hen" and tonight will tuck into a Fuller's Golden Pride.
It all went wrong a few years ago when beers over a certain strength got hit with a higher rate of tax. This meant beers like Old Speckled Hen being nerfed from 5.2% on draught to 4.5% which ruined the beer. ESB got knocked down from 5.9% to 5.5% but that's not had such a detrimental effect on the flavour. Stella Artois got nerfed from 5.2% down to 5% as did just about every "premium" or "export" lager.
Depends on what you're drinking, been having a few American pale ales lately and they tend to be fairly strong (6-7%) as well as being a pleasant surprise to people who think American beers are all Bud or, horror of horrors, Bud Light.
Same goes for our beers, with bitters traditionally being a low 3.5% to porters at a nice winter warming 6-7%
If you're after decent beer in Southampton your best bet is the Guide Dog in Inner Avenue or the South Western Arms in St Denys, who between them always win the the CAMRA awards in the city.
Decent beer tends not to be in the centre of the city as they go for fast turnover which mostly means commercial lagers.
Having said that most of the beers tend to be in the 3.5-5 range as it's taste that matters. Winter "warmers" (usually stouts or porters) can be 6+.
Not so sure, or would a absolutely no ethanol person living to the age of 70, I don't know any such persons, but I bet there are such ones too then live to become 140 due to an occasional visit to the pub.
Still my grandmother who lived to become 97 used to have a glass of read wine about once a week and told me she felt it was good for her.
...was snow white. His skin was thick, dry, and deeply creased, the texture of screwed up leather, and his eyes were yellow. When he smiled, it was clear that he had long since lost all his teeth.
Interviewer: "Sir, to what do you attribute your old age?"
Man: "I drink 20 pints of lager, a litre of wine, and a litre of whiskey every day!"
Interviewer: "And exactly how old are you?"
Man: "I'll be 24 next month!"
It's so obvious - to me at least - that these "studies" are full of shit. Why do we keep trying to find health benefits to drinking a toxin?!? Could it have something to do with the fact that the majority of the world LOVES to drink every fricken day? We are constantly looking to justify the vices we all enjoy. Instead of scientists actually spending their time on a worthwhile research study they waste their time trying to prove that a toxin actually benefits our health. Here they are now saying it will DOUBLE YOUR LIFESPAN. Are you fucking serious? If it makes the alcoholics the world over sleep better at night then it's mission achieved? Double your life span pffffttt. So if someone were going to live to be 70 years old w/o consuming alcohol, if they drank alcohol everyday from the moment they were born would they live to be 140 years old? The longest living people in the world are the Sardinians, the Okinawans, and the California Adventist. There is a Nat. Geo. article on the subject and they show similarities b/w the three groups to correlate life longevity with several main points. Diet, exercise, sense of life purpose, and a close and supportive community. Of the three only the Sardinians drink alcohol. Maybe the Okinawans do occasionally but they do not consume anything in excess. Double your life span ... what a joke. Horrible science. In the same vein this is why we always see studies on coffee, or medicinal cannabis. It's all BS. Caffeine is horrible for you and chronic use of cannabis is as well.
So you're obviously some kind of substance abuse addict who's in recovery, why else would you be quoting chapter and verse from the addicts recovery manual?
For the most people moderate substance abuse is no more dangerous that getting up out of bed and walking to work. Most people know their limits, they know when enough is enough, sadly there are those who do not, those are the people who need your "advice". This sort of survey, which I must add like most of these are mostly full of crap, applies to a general populace who know how to take things in moderation not at-risk substance abusers in society.
There's plenty of good British beers at 5% or stronger. Speckled Hen, Hobgoblin, Old Peculier, Tanglefoot, Bishop's Finger and Absolution are all great beers. Greene King's Abbot Ale is perfectly acceptable, although most Greene King pubs are incapable of serving a decent pint of beer. With real ale, you don't necessarily need a lot of alcohol for it to taste great though.
The bad rep that American beers have got mostly isn't their alcohol content, it's their complete lack of taste. Better American beers for sure can be OK - I liked Killian Red during my stint in Detroit. But the mass-produced stuff like Coors is all really *really* bad.
Interestingly, brewpubs are a particularly American phenomenon as a reaction to the insanely poor quality of the mass-produced stuff. They never happened in the UK. Partly perhaps it's due to Americans having more disposable income and tending to go out more. Partly though it could also be that the "average" beer in the UK is reasonably OK taste-wise. Or maybe us Brits have just got lazy...
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