some thoughts on alcohols, especially if like most of us you didn't develop an affinity for alcohol in college because you never binge drank your way through semesters.
I used to hate wine particularly red, particularly dry. Acclimation from a regular exposure really does wonders for allowing your body to adjust.
A couple tricks. Stick to whites and light american beers because they are cold, You can't taste cold things very well, so that will help blunt the experience by numbing your tongue. Reds and dark beers are worst because they're served room temperature for the express purpose of letting you taste the thing. But if your tongue is not acclimated to alcohol from lengthy experience all your brain will process is the bitter notes, and you'll never really mentally process any of the other tastes your tongue is experiencing, because your brain is overwhelmed on red alert with the bitter flavors. I would not necessarily recommend sweeter wines like a Reisling because sometimes the combination of cloyingly sweet and bitter is pretty awful, but you're welcome to try sweeter wines if you find that having a sweet taste is enough to distract you from the bitterness of the alcohol.
So where else is your brain going to freak out from something you do it doesn't like and what can we learn from it? Imagine you're on a treadmill, at some point while exercising your brain says 'stop stop stop I'm f****** tired you goddamn bastard stop stop stop panic, you motherfucker stop STOP!' and if you ignore it and push through eventually your brain gives up with its whining and goes off into a corner to pout and you find that you still have plenty of juice to finish the last part of your run/jog/crossfit. In fact sometimes you get a runner's high where your brain goes in the opposite direction and you get all euphoric with the endorphins (interestingly, alcohol consumption can also release endorphins).
So how might one replicate that with drinking wine your brain initially rejects as too bitter to bother with? There's a wine tasting 'trick' that I find useful. Take a teeny teeny tiny sip of wine and suck it back and forth through your teeth (you can do it just with your spit it makes an awful sound, but you can do it closed mouth as well) This is going to magnify the flavors a thousand fold and you'll really be overwhelmed with all the bitterness. It's pretty horrendous. But you can basically exhaust your brain's objections by doing this a couple times and your brain will go into the corner to pout, just like trying to finish a sprint on a treadmill. Another option is to smell the wine first before first tasting it (see the wine tasting scene from Sideways) because while you will smell the alcohol, and that will make your brain send up an alert, you can also smell other aspects of the wine, and if you try and focus on the non-alcohol smells of the wine your brain will be "Primed" to taste the non-alcohol nonbitter flavors of the wine. if you smell it and all you can think of is the alcohol, your brain will be "Primed" to taste only the alcohol bitter flavors of the wine, and you will have a worse experience than usual. But if you instruct your brain to consciously focus on the nonalcohol scents and aromas of the wine you'll have much greater likelyhood of a positive taste experience, I think you have a better chance of successfully directing your brain's attention and controlling what your brain is primed for with smell than with taste.
That said, I still cannot really stand hoppy beers (hoppy means bitter, and most IPAs are nothing but bitter to me, I can't taste anything else) but I have learned to really love malty and yeasty dark beers. And I very much love fruity and tangy light beers akin to hefeweizen--Allagash White is one of my favorite things ever.
With regards to mixed drinks, many people will find more success here for a variety of reasons: One they are really cold, so the alcohol bitterness is almost always muted. Two they engage much more of the tongue than wine does. Take a margarita, for example: you have sweet with the syrup, lemon and lime, you have sour with the lemon and lime you have salty with the salted rim and lastly bitter. Basically, your mouth is going to be overwhelmed with competing flavors, and unless your brain is really primed to focus on the alcohol, your brain will have a hard time zeroing in on the bitter flavor than it would for beer or wine, you're basically overloading your brain by triggering all the receptors (except maybe umami) on your tongue at the same time. Margarita's in particular I have a hard time even tasting the alcohol anymore because my brain gets so happy with sour/sweet/salt combinations, it's bliss.
prof. Higgings songs are simply hilarious XD A hymn to him rates particularly high in laughter factor.
