 If you drink alcohol on a regular basis, what role does Vodka or other spirits play? Let's talk about it. Hey there, njbrew22.com here with another unscripted, off-the-hook kind of discussion about alcohol. We've been talking about alcohol here for a while on njbrew22.com. It was a weekly wine review thing and then we decided that regular drinkers cannot sustain a long time on wine. We chose red wine and we just stopped. So we switched over to the spiked seltzers and we're still on them. They're really, really good and they enable us, especially when we water our drinks down. This is actually a vodka drink and we'll talk about that in a few seconds here. Totally different experience. Anyway, we're drinking these seltzers and we have one or two core spiked seltzers that we like to drink because we can control and throttle our alcohol consumption while at the same time enjoying these quote-unquote benefits of consuming alcohol. Responsibly, we're not getting stupid drunk and we're not driving and we're not doing anything that harms anybody. But I was doing the math here and like, let's just say you drank every day of the week. And our two bottles of wine expenditures, we tried to find this sweet spot for a cost and it was usually around between $13 and $15 a night per person if you drank two bottles of wine. That was our little line in the sand. And then when I switched over to the seltzers, something happened. My tolerance for alcohol went down as well as my weight has gone down too. So even though I could polish away a 12 pack of seltzers just drinking them straight, we were able to enjoy a night of consumption. We had six cans of seltzer and that probably averages around out to about like $7, $8, $9, $10 a day. So the cost went down fairly significantly, 20-30% over drinking cheap wine. And the seltzers by, we're not cheap. It's not like you had a gold standard for seltzers where you felt better or more refined than a cheapo brand. All the seltzers were basically the same. We just decided we wanted the lowest carbs, lowest sugar because I think the sugar in these things can dictate whether you feel good or bad the next day depending on how much you drink. Almost any alcohol, I don't care how great it is, you drink way too much of it without enough hydration, you're going to feel like crap. So it doesn't matter if it's $1,000 a bottle of wine. So I started looking into like things like this Pinnacle vodka and I started examining the vodka industry in general. And I found something, I mean since we weren't regular vodka drinkers, I found something quite interesting. The price disparity for the similarly packaged products, 1.75 or 750 ml, whatever it may be, was incredibly different. The low end plastic bottles of cheap hobo vodka was, I don't even know what it cost. I didn't even look, I think it's like 10 bucks or less for 1.75 of the cheapest stuff ever. And I have bad memories of drinking those cheap vodkas from my early days when I was a teenager. Yeah, I drank before it was legal. Is somebody going to ban me because I'm 40, 30 years ago, whatever I drank illegally? Throw me in jail. Anyway, the whole point is that there's so much BS in this vodka and spirit. The whole alcohol industry is BS in my opinion. Most of it is marketing, most of it is fake beliefs that you think you know what you're talking about. But you never really step back and like almost have an out of body experience where you say, you know, really, does it really make a difference? So the price difference between the let's say the 1.75 liter bottles of vodka is incredible. It goes from like the $10 range all the way up to almost $60 or $70 a bottle, I think for the premium great goose. And I don't think it makes a difference, especially if you keep your drinking down. So here's what we did. First of all, I did the math and even a $30 bottle of 1.75 bottle of vodka. This wasn't $30, but like I was looking at Tito's, which is very, we've had that before and it's okay. We didn't like the taste too much. The $30 bottle of a 1.75 bottle of vodka is cheaper per night. If you drink the same amount of alcohol than drinking the seltzers by about, I don't know, I think 30 or 40% cheaper. I have another video coming up next week about being a math nerd and really truly having a controlled experiment. Because one of the things, the bad things, the negative things I can think of with drinking spirits or vodka in general are that it's extremely easy to over consume. Whereas a beer, you can't really, beer or even wine for that matter, you're limited by your rate of consumption. Each glass or can or bottle of beer is the same size and you just have to chug faster when it comes to drinking a beer or a glass of wine. That's why I throttle, I throttle by diluting and I enjoy drinking. I can't drink small, you know those little high ball glasses they have where people put whiskey on the rocks and they sip it. I'm not a sipper. Some people may be able to sip. I cannot sip. I love drinking fast. Coffee, water, this drink I'm drinking which is seltzer and like a little bit of vodka. Just to make it, it's about the same amount of alcohol as my seltzer drinks. I had to do that. But the thing with spirits and mixed drinks is that it's extremely easy to make your drink extremely potent and no two drinks are the same unless you use a scale like we're going to show you next week. Or, you know, measuring cup. It's so easy to, you can, let's say you're having a good time and all of a sudden you start making your drink stronger towards the end of the night. It happens to most people. It's very easy to fall into that trap of having this massive 50 something ounce bottle of 80 proof booze and then drinking too much. It's a really, really slippery slope to be on. So you really have to control how fast you drink it and that takes discipline and of course discipline is not necessarily conducive to the more drinks you have. Because once you're on drink four or five, your discipline goes down and you may, it's a slippery slope. So anyway, just real quick, this is supposed to be like a quick review about pinnacle vodka. I mean, I talked about it last week how it's a really good deal right now because they have a $7 rebate. I know we're splitting hairs and pinching pennies here, but it's a really good deal right now because $17.99 at most liquor stores with a $7 rebate, you can't beat it. It's a good, I think it's a fantastic, so fantastic vodka. So what I did was I bought these little airline bottles at various liquor stores and I'm like, I want to try various brands out just to see how I like the taste. And for a buck, for a 50 milliliter bottle, it's an easy to experiment. It's affordable. You don't have to invest in a $50 bottle of vodka just to be disappointed and have to suffer through it or donate it to somebody. So I bought a couple of these things. I bought, you know, this El Chippo. This is Platinum 7X. I have no idea who makes that. There's the pinnacle. There was this Seagrams Extra Smooth. And there was this Western Sun, Texas Vodka. This is 10 times distilled. They all have their little marketing sticks, whereas cars, you know, you get miles per gallon and cubic feet of trunk space. They all have features now. It's like, I talked to a lot of people at various liquor stores to get their true opinion. I spoke to them off the record and it became clear to me after a few weeks that the vodka industry is bullshit. Okay. It's complete and utter BS. It's personal choice. There's nothing magical in a bottle of vodka that's going to make you, there's some even that say you won't get a hangover. I think we tried one of those. I don't think it really worked. I think it was psychosomatic the whole reaction. You drink too much. You're going to feel like shit no matter what it is. So, like now the 10X distilled, 7X distilled and smooth. You know what? I tasted these without even really looking at the labels. Just to give you a quick five second review of each one. The Western Sun was smooth. It was good. I didn't mind it. New Amsterdam, which is I guess being touted by a lot of people. I tried it. I didn't like it. It tasted like that bad vodka I had when I was a teenager. This Seagrams Extra Smooth, that passed the test. I'll try it if it's cheap. The Platinum 7X, that was just fine. I didn't even notice it in my drink. And the Pinnacle, we chose the Pinnacle because it was equally as smooth as the other ones that we liked. But we had the rebates. This became the cheapest. Let's say with tax, $12 for about, I think, God, I forget what the math was. It was like 40 or so drinks. 38 drinks out of $1.7. That's cheaper than any other form of alcohol that we can consume. So that's it. I think we like it because it's smooth. And if you can control how much you drink in a given night and maintain your hydration, I think vodka is really not a bad choice for alcohol consumption. Obviously it's missing the aura of, or whatever you would call it, the mystery of talking about wine and finishes and all this other stuff and hints and aromas. Your vodka, like if you get a good vodka that's not too harsh and smooth, you almost don't taste it. So your vodka drinking experience is dependent upon whether you mix it with something. Some people like to do it half and half cranberry. That's terrible. I hate it. Cranberry juice filled with sugar. Like I said, I mix it with non-calorie flavored seltzer. No artificial sweeteners either. And I put a splash of lemon and a ginger capsule in all my drinks these days. And it's just fantastic. You really ought to try it. So it all depends on your drinking style. I guess I kind of lost my point here, but I think vodka is completely different. It doesn't have, like I said, the same kind of mystery and all this other BS. It's just a way of catching a little buzz without feeling like utter crap the next day. And I think it's the most affordable way. And if you find a good enough vodka with a good enough rebate, it's not low class either. Even though this is a plastic bottle, big deal. It's less heavy recycling. So that's it. I rambled on here, but I think vodka, we're definitely going to keep it in the rotation. I still enjoy the flavors of the spiked seltzers a lot. Especially the Smirnoff ones are still by far the best of the bunch. But vodka for economic reasons is not a bad idea either. And quick little no here. If you ever, like just want to have a couple drinks before bed, but you don't want to go through the pain of drinking six or seven drinks. If you need to and you can pull out your little like emergency weapon, if you ever want to just have three drinks before bed, you can always spike your spiked seltzer with a splash of vodka as well just to make them a little stronger if you need to. That's the good thing about having vodka on hand is that if you need to turbo charge something, say you're running late and you just have one drink before bed and you want to give yourself a little sedative to fall asleep, you can do that in short order by just spiking your drink. But again, that becomes problematic because you might overdo it and have another and another and another and all of a sudden you're hungover the next day. So self-control and throttling and being aware of how much you drink is always important. But then again, how often do we act rationally and intelligently? It's not too often. But that's it. Next week, it's drinking for math nerds. And I'll show you exactly how you can perform self-experiments which are a lot of fun. You learn a lot about yourself and you're able to find your faults and improve your daily life by using metrics and real world comparisons and so on. I'm rambling. I'm done. See you guys next week on the booze chat here on njbu22.com. Please visit the site. Subscribe to the channel. Hit the bell. All that other crap. If you listen for 20 minutes, I think I don't know how long I talked here but that's it. Take care.