Here’s serious video by the band Buckcherry on the dangers of alcohol and its effects on sexual performance.

Just kidding, they don’t seem to care.

And for you dirty filthy Godless perverts, they’ve made an “unclean” version stuffed with obscene language and nudity and pornography and every other NSFW thing you sick people enjoy.  It’s on the Playboy site…you know, the one with all the WHORES on it.

So I’m about to debut a new feature on the site, Bottle Shots, where I review various beers and wines and spirits, but I figured before I did that I needed to let you know a little about me.  About the kind of drinker I am.  I mean…who am I to tell you how or what do drink?

A mystery, wrapped in an enigma…smothered in secret sauce

It’s simple really.  I drink for one reason and one reason only: I LOVE IT.  There are times I down Natty Ice like it’s my job (and for the purposes of this site, it kind of is), and there are times that I slowly sip 18 yr old scotch like it’s my last drink on earth.  I’m equally at home at a wine tasting of Argentinian Malbecs as I am at a keg party.  I LOVE to drink, every aspect, every reason, every moment spent with a drink in my hand I count as a blessed one. I love drinking with my friends.  I love drinking by myself.  I love drinking with my family.  When I write on this site and espouse drinking like a man or how to drink tequila, it’s not because I’m trying to dictate anyone’s drinking habits.  Honestly all I want is for people to get the most out of their drinking experience.  I want them to feel what I feel.  I want them to get the same joy, the same full experience they COULD be having with just a little bit of guidance.  When I drink, I mean really drink and embrace not just the chemical effects but combine that with the knowledge I have and the shared experience of enjoying a good drink and truly live the “whole package” of what drinking is really about, THAT is what I try to get across in my writing, in what I put here so that hopefully people out there will learn to enjoy booze the way I have.

That being said, the way I’m approaching these reviews is simply this: do I like it, and would I drink it again? Not as some sort of beer or wine or mixology expert, but just as a guy who likes to drink.  I’m not a supertaster and I don’t profess to be an expert in anything other than being the biggest fan drinking ever had.  So if you’re ok with that, then let’s keep this party going and drink some friggin’ delicious booze, amirite!?!

We have our first submitted pics of readers wearing their oh-so-sexy DrinkPlanner shirts! They were even kind enough to send a little note with the pictures:

Hey DrinkPlanner!

Me and the wife bought a few of your shirts and decided to wear them out to a party at a friends BBQ this weekend.  They were a big hit!  Everybody was asking where we got them and about your site.  I’ve attached some photos from the night showing off our new duds, thought you might like to see them in action.

Keep up the great work!

WILL DO.  It’s true, the couple that drinks together stays together.  Here’s some of the pics they sent along, I think the shirts look pretty damn good, if I do say so myself:

Damn Skippy

Putting the shirt to work

Whiskey in hand, like his momma taught him

Showcasing the shirts so that all may bask in their glory

So anyone else out there with shirts, feel free to send in your pics of you living the dream in them (and I’m happy to crop out or blur faces or whatever for anonymity, if you want) so you can show the world how it’s done.  Wait, you don’t have a shirt yet?  Well get your fine heiney to the DrinkPlanner Shirt Shop and get yourself a new wardrobe (just in time for back to school!)

There’s a lot of really stupid writing about drinking out on the web.  From idiotic lists of shots with mayonnaise in them to assholes telling you to drink antifreeze to people telling you to pour alcohol into your asshole, drinking advice on the web ranges from retarded to downright life-threatening.  Nobody seems interested in achieving and maintaining a high-quality level of drunkenness (or what I call Perfect Drunk).  They all want to make sure you’re so wrecked you puke all over your now-former fiancé and wind up naked on the front lawn spooning with a VERY unhappy neighborhood dog.  That is not what this article is about.

It IS, however, about this: tips on how to get to your personal Perfect Drunk as quickly as possible while keeping comfortable and minimizing chances of making yourself sick.  So it is with much fanfare and rapturous applause that we present:

Part 1: The Setup

So…you’ve decided that you’re going to get shithammered tonight.  Good for you! To start your night off right, you need to kickstart your system with something.  We suggest:

1. A Shot - Duh.  The less sweet and the fewer mixers, the better.  No point in starting your stomach off with a nasty syrupy mess.  Booze is going to make sweet sweet love with your stomach tonight, so the two might as well get acquainted now.

2. Pound a Beer - If a shot doesn’t meet your fancy, kill a beer.  Doesn’t matter how you do it –funnel, shotgun, Bierstick or a plain old CHUG– get that sumbitch in your body as quickly as possible.  You’ll have plenty of time for leisurely sipping later.

Dirty dishes, shmirty shmishes…you’ve got drinking to do!

Part 2: The Steady Drink

You should always have at least one drink in your hand, if achieving Perfect Drunk is your mission.  This will be your sipping drink throughout the night.  Always keep it full, and always keep sipping on it.  You have a few options:

1. Straight Alcohol - With Perfect Drunk as your goal of the evening (or morning, we don’t judge), diluting your alcohol with a mixer is keeping you from your goal.  So if this is what you choose, be it martini or wine or bourbon, keep on sippin’.  However, if you’re not able to stomach straight booze, you have another option…

2. Booze and Diet Soda - No, this isn’t about keeping your girlish figure (stick to the salad if that’s your concern).  Research shows that mixing a drink with a diet soda boosts alcohol-to-system ratios by as much as 50%.  Something in the diet drink chemicals actually increases the alcohol absorption to your bloodstream.  Bonus! However, you may not prefer straight liquor or sweetened libations, in which case…

3. Beer and a Shot - If beer is your preferred method of intoxication, give it a boost with a shot of hard alcohol (also known as a sidecar or a depth charge).  In Russia a beer with a shot of vodka in it is called a Yorsh, and the flavor of the vodka is barely noticeable.  I personally love a Boilermaker, which is a beer with a shot of whiskey (preferably bourbon).  Pick a medium-dark beer like Newcastle or Amber Bock for the best flavor combination with the whiskey*.

Holy shit…can they really do that?  Is that technology out there?

Part 3: The Build

If you just start with a shot and then keep drinking, you may eventually get where you want to be, but we’re trying to fasttrack this bitch.  You’re going to need to punctuate your sipping drinks with other drinks.

1. Take Shots - Noticing a trend?  One or two shots per sippin’ drink that you go through should be adequate, but use your discretion.  You may want to ramp up even faster in the beginning.  Listen to your body (trust your hips, I’ve heard they don’t lie).

2. Play a Drinking Game - Doesn’t matter which one really, but playing a game is obviously going to speed up your drinking while being a fun way to pass the time.  This does not mean you stop drinking your Steady Drink; whatever it is, keep drinking it regularly. Your drinks in Asshole, beer pong, Brooklyn or whatever are merely boosts to your main drinking.

What are you thinking about you toolbag?  It’s not like there’s skill involved.  Pick a card and drink already.

Part 4: Maintaining the Buzz

Hooray, you’re drunk! You’ve done it!  Resist the urge to call your parents to let them know of your great achievement (they won’t be nearly as proud as you are).  But you’re not done yet…keeping yourself in the state of Perfect Drunk is serious business, so here’s what you do:

1. Keep Drinking - But tone it down a notch.  It’s not easy, because you’ll want to keep taking lots of shots because some stupid part of your brain figures that if This Much Booze = Perfect Drunk, then MORE Booze = MORE PERFECTER DRUNKerEST (don’t even try to tell me that’s not the kind of words your brain makes up with when you’re PD).  This is not how things work.  You’ll have to keep drinking to stay at the level you are, but reel it in a bit.  Remember that alcohol doesn’t work immediately, and it needs time to work through your system.  Not that you’ll remember this when you’re PD, but at least I can say I tried.

2. Eat Something Occasionally - Remember, this is about keeping a solid buzz for a long time.  Having a little food in your stomach to soak things up will keep you from rounding the corner too quickly and skidding off of Happy Drunk Drive and careening headlong into Pukesville Gorge.  Keep it simple: chips, pretzels, pizza bagels, etc.  Leftover sushi is not your friend right now.

3. Do Something - Sitting there and doing nothing but drinking is an easy way to go over your limit without realizing it.  We’ve all had that moment where we’ve been sitting for a while and drinking, then go to stand up and say “Whoa!” as The Drunk clops us right in the chops.  Moving around, talking to different people at a party or whatever will help you keep tabs on just how inebriated you are and allow you to gauge your intake.

“What do you mean there’s nothing left to drink?  I had like 10 bottles!”

Part 5: Denouement

Eventually, your blissful journey will have to end (unless you’re a very successful hobo or an incredibly wealthy person without responsibility).  It was a great ride while it lasted, but let yourself down easy:

1. Drink Water - The single best hangover prevention/cure.  Change out your sippin’ drink to water when you’re starting to wind down to make the next morning a little easier.

2. Go to Sleep - What better way to end a night of pure joy than with good old fashioned SLEEP.  If there are repercussions to pay for your wanton consumption, let them wait until morning.  End the evening on a high note and sleep the sleep of angels.  Maybe even with an angel, if you’re lucky.

This picture is titled “Sleep Little Angel”.  That’s friggin’ hilarious. Shame about that beer though.

The fine art of getting sublimely hammered is not an easy one.  It’s very easy to oversteer in one direction or the other, so hopefully this guide will assist you in your journey to Perfect Drunk.  Have any tips you think we missed (highly unlikely), leave them in the comments!

Another blissful night of debauchery ends with you straddling some fence.  When will you ever learn?

Some final notes:

• Don’t try to take shortcuts like drinking on an empty stomach, sleep deprived, or mixing booze and pills.  This is not Drinking to Puke or Endanger Yourself, so don’t.
• This is not an article for new drinkers or people who rarely drink.  This is for those of us who drink on a fairly regular basis and have a medium-to-high tolerance level.  Get your game up, NEWB, then come back.
• You may not need to try all these methods at once.  Try them out one by one and see what works for you.
• Know your own limits.  Don’t drink more than you know you should just because it says so here.  You know you, so don’t be stupid and have your jerk family members come and sue us after you die of alcohol poisoning because “Derrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr…. DrinkPlanner told me to do this!”.  You’re an adult, and responsible for your own decisions.  To put it plainly for the super-dense: DrinkPlanner is in no way responsible for any injury or illness you incur while drinking.  Don’t be dumb.

*For a truly brain-melting experience, pair this up with a maduro cigar.  Seriously, these three flavors were born to be together.  Dark, smoky, complex and sweet…I’m telling you, if you’re a cigar smoker you should make this happen.  And if you’re not a cigar smoker…what have you been doing with your life?

Yep, just a few housekeeping notes…the comments are now open, and don’t require registration.  However, if this starts getting abused or heavily spammed, we’ll go back to the way it was before.  If you’ve already registered, I think you can still keep using that login if you want.  Whatevs.

And if you’ll look to your right (no idiot, on THIS PAGE, not at the wall next to you) you’ll notice a link for our soon-to-be crack-a-lackin’ mailing list.  We’ll be doing…something with it, we’re still banging out the details of what that will be exactly, but if you care to be on the BLEEDING EDGE of this website’s communications, well then click that link and cram your info in as fast as you can.

Here’s a random picture of a man listening to booze.

Time flies, doesn’t it?  It seems like just yesterday we were first writing about our pals at Kuroshio and their drink deals.  Now we turn around, and our little baby boy is one year old.  We look back fondly at the little sushi joint infant once crawling around eating Cheerios off the floor, but Kuroshio has grown up to be quite the big boy in the community, throwing down some of the best fried rice I’ve ever had not to mention fantastic sushi and consistently solid drink deals.  So congratulations Kuroshio! May your chicken fried rice reign supreme forever, your sushi be the freshest around, and your sake be the life of many more parties to come!

To celebrate, Kuroshio will be throwing down a 1 Year Anniversary Event like no other this Friday, August 1st. There will be free prizes given away and HALF OFF their ENTIRE BAR! Yes, sushi and booze fans, your beers, sakes and wines are all half price this Friday.  Thanks Kuroshio!

*Yes, I realize that I just consciously created and unleashed upon the internets the word “Sushibration”.  I’m not proud of myself.

Sometimes it’s hard to be a drinker and feel normal.  The nancy-pants goodie-two-shoes of the world have neutered most of popular culture to the point that you’d think nobody in this world drinks recreationally without it ending in DUI, homicide, rape, or a big vomit-y trip to the hospital.  It’s a pretty grim depiction of a fairly common part of most adults’ lives.  In movies and TV, you’re pretty hard pressed to find people living and drinking as normal people do.  It can make you feel like something’s wrong with you, as if partaking in the completely legal (and healthy) act of imbibing alcohol makes you some sort of outcast.  A misfit.  A pariah.

Well fear not, fellow boozers.  I’ve compiled a list of some great TV shows from recent years to help you feel right at home.  Let’s dig in…

5. It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia - It’s no surprise the characters on this show drink often: the show is set in a bar.  Four friends (and one “Dad” played by Danny Devito) run Paddy’s Pub, a small Philly bar where a lot more goes down than it probably should.  Booze is almost always to blame.  Hilarious through and through, the gang has taken on North Korea, fought in underground fight clubs, slept with each others parents (ew), and lit dog shit on fire trying to intimidate an Israeli immigrant.  Here’s a clip from the show where Charlie has to attend a court-sanctioned AA meeting after the aforementioned dog-shit-on-fire incident…drunk:

4. The Wire - Sweet slippery Christmas, I hope real cops don’t drink this much.  Actually, I wouldn’t blame them if they did, if they had to deal with anything even remotely like the Baltimore depicted here.  Gritty, raw, emotional, and often based on real events and people, The Wire pulls no punches.  When the crew isn’t up on the wire or staking out Marlo and his crew, they’re downing booze by the damn gallon.  It’s entirely justified, as the only reason anyone needs to drink in this show is simply being alive in Baltimore (just like real life!).  In the Season 5 premiere, I counted at least three scenes set in bars.  This is not atypical.

I couldn’t find a good drinking clip on the internets, so here’s a funny one where McNulty and Bunk perform an entire scene using one very NSFW word.  You’ve been warned.

3. Three Sheets - We’ve mentioned Zane and his show before, but it bears repeating that this lucky bastard gets paid to goof around and travel the friggin’ globe drinking the best (and sometimes the worst) the world has to offer.  I mean damnit all, this bastard has the job of a lifetime and he actually does it.  You’d expect a fellow drunkard to screw it up and get fired, but he’s actually doing better and better and getting more episodes added per season (probably because it’s his job to drink on the job).  Note to THE WORLD: if anyone is looking for someone to do basically the same thing but on a different network and show, contact me.  I will make Zane look like a damned clown.  Here’s a Season 1 highlight reel (and every single episode is available on Hulu).

2. Mad Men - Maybe this is how the world was meant to be.  Set in the early 1960s in a Madison Avenue advertising firm, this was a time and place where people drank and smoked and nobody hassled them about it for one second.  Maybe they fully understood the risks, maybe they didn’t, but they didn’t let that stop them from having a good time.  Men could drink at work, at home, and nobody even gave a crap if they drove home a little tipsy (they just drove reaaaally slow).  But they didn’t stop there.  The writers use their period-perfect recreation to say profound and beautiful things about drinking.  Here’s a choice quote:

Roger Sterling: You don’t know how to drink. Your whole generation, you drink for the wrong reasons. My generation… we drink because it’s good. Because it feels better than unbuttoning your collar. Because we deserve it. We drink because it’s what men do.

He sure said it.

In the following clip, we see main character Don Draper in a smoke-filled bar, enjoying an Old Fashioned, and chatting with a server about why he smokes the brand of cigarettes he does.

1. Deadwood - Seems like the farther back in history these shows go, the more drinking there is.  Deadwood is no exception.  The Old West has never been portrayed as rough or realistic as it was on HBO’s Deadwood.  Didn’t matter the time of day or the occasion, it was always a good time for a drink.  Here’s a sampling of some dialogue from the show:

Jane: Maybe I will have a fuckin’ drink, just for sociability’s sake…’cause I am a fuckin’ drunk
Joanie: What’s your preference?
Jane: That it ain’t been previously swallowed…bourbon, if ya got it

If you didn’t notice the names, that’s the way the women talk and drink on this show.  The whiskey flows pretty much non-stop in Deadwood, as do the profanities and quite a bit of blood.  As you’ll see briefly in the clip below, some people even made their living by setting up a few boxes on the side of the thoroughfare with a sign reading “Whiskey Shots”, and had more than enough business to get by.  There’s a lot more in this fan-made montage set to some Johnny Cash highlighting some of the rough living and hard drinking in Deadwood.

Every once in a while we get a comment here at DrinkPlanner that brings up something that I feel needs to be addressed in a full-on front-page post.  I’ve only done it once before (under much less pleasant circumstances) but it happens that someone brings up something that leads me to believe that there may be some misconception about things I’ve written that are large enough that I feel the need to share with the whole class.  So, this is in response to a comment left here by mikhail7:

“after reading some of the other comments, I’ll say this, and DrinkPlanner, please disagree with me if you wish, I wont take it personally. A man should take things as they come. A man should not ever have to sugar coat or soften anything that is not meant to be softened. Whiskey, beer, Vodka, Rum and so on are made the way they are made for a reason. They are meant to be the way they are. Some men, who have a lack of testostorone, cannot handle things they way they are meant to be. So they have to put pink umbrellas in their drinks. And if you, a man, cannot obey at the very least commandment number one, you are no man. Please disagree with me, i like different opinions. Thank you”

Well since you asked mikhail7…ok, I disagree with you. While there are some things, like single-malt scotches, that are downright sinful to mix, many are greatly improved by the addition of other alcohols or mixers.  I mean, I get your point about things being made to stand alone, and many do that quite well and are absolutely best enjoyed that way, but there are also plenty of drinks that are designed to be mixed.  What would you do with vermouth except add it to a martini?  Or triple sec?  Or bitters?  Vodka is by and large a tasteless drink, practically BEGGING to be mixed with stronger flavors to make a better drink.  While I’m certainly no stranger to a shot of vodka, I like it better when it actually tastes like something.

There are tons of classic manly drinks that are mixed, from the martini to the Manhattan to the Pegu club.   I DARE you to go up to the old guy in the bar drinking an Old Fashioned telling him he’s not drinking a manly drink and see if you walk away with your nuts.  Hell, even Hemingway drank Daiquiris (which are really not at all girly in their classic form), and he was a hard-drinking seafaring bullfighting son-of-a-bitch like few others who have walked this world.

I have no reason to post this, but it’s from this series that’s so amazing I’m just going to stick them in posts whenever I feel like it

Beyond that, many things complement each other, and the once-lowly job of tending bar has in recent years been elevated to the level of “mixology“, all based on the art of creating amazing new drinks by combining alcohols and other mixers very specifically and creatively.  Whether born out of the locale the alcohol comes from or necessity of circumstances or complete accident, some very fine drinks are mixed.  In his discussion of the daiquiri, drink expert David Wondrich gives the following eloquent explanation:

“In fact, the daiquiri represents such an obvious marriage between local ingredients — rum, sugar, limes — and American technology — cocktail shaker, ice — that it would take the chowder-headedest duffer who ever buttoned a trouser not to invent it.”

And that’s exactly how drinks like the daiquiri and the margarita and mojito and cuba libre came about, because you’d have to be mouth-breathingly daft not to mix such clearly complimentary ingredients together.  God lovingly placed sugar cane and limes on the same continent for a good reason, and we’d be remiss not to take advantage of such a serendipitous happenstance of fate.

So I just wanted to clear the air to make sure it was understood that I’m not such a booze purist that I believe every single alcohol should always and no-matter-what be consumed straight up.  That’s all.