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Comment by dpkendal | Hacker News Reader

Saying you "cannot stand the taste of alcohol" is like saying you "cannot stand the smell of air."

Well, alcohol is flavourless on its own. Also, it will kill you if you drink it raw, so don't try that.

Just like air, context is everything. The air in a sewer is much worse than the air in a field, because of the odours that are mixed into it. Now, preference for drinks is 100% subjective, unlike preference for air, but the idea is the same. If you only tried beer, perhaps you'd prefer wine. Or vice-versa.

You just have to find your own drinks you like.

> The only drinks I liked were usually labelled "girls' drinks" and I was constantly made fun of.

That's shameful (that you were made fun of). What, specifically, were the drinks you were made fun of for liking?

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I guess by "taste of alcohol" I mean the taste of beer, wine, champagne, tequila, vodka, and anything else non-mixed I can't think of right now. I pretty much tried them all in my pursuit to find something I can drink without feeling tortured. In this quest I found that I was ok with cocktails (Long Island Ice Tea was my drink of choice for a while), but those you can only get when you're out at a bar. What about parties where the drinks come straight out of bottles from the grocery store? This is where I discovered Smirnoff Ice, which to me just doesn't have that gross alcohol taste. But of course because of that it's not generally considered a "manly" drink, so my peers always pressured me to drink "non-girly" drinks instead by making fun of me. After a while I just got sick of it and decided not to drink at all anymore, because it just wasn't worth the constant teasing.

You tell your drinking pals that someone on the Internet told you that there is no shame in drinking Smirnoff Ice.

Anyway, now it seems like I'm putting peer-pressure on you to start drinking again. That's even less cool than someone who laughs at a person's taste in drinks. I'll try to keep that in check.

> it will kill you if you drink it raw

Sorry, but this is total nonsense. I knew many a chem student with access to pure ethanol (not to mention the wits to manufacture it). They are still with us (as are the photos)

So, pure alcohol/ethanol will not kill you faster than the equivalent liquor. You may, of course, wish for death ..

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