I went to a party school for college (a top school in the US though) and was a pretty big partier, so hopefully I can offer the “general population perspective” as I think my early alcohol experiences are closer to that of an average person than to a typical LessWronger.
If you average all my years in college, I probably drank 3.5 or 4 days a week with about a quarter of those sessions to nearly blackout-level intoxication. In my experience, college-aged kids who are relatively new to drinking only care about the intoxicating effects. Since they’re not acclimated to the taste of alcohol yet, NO alcoholic drinks really taste good, which is why high school kids and college 1st years drink so much plastic-bottle vodka, usually mixed with or followed by something sugary like soda or a sports drink. Some kinds of alcohol will taste especially bad to new drinkers though, and some types require you to drink more volume to get the desired effect, which is a related selection factor, so there is some taste preference going on.
Fast forward a few years to late-college where people have been drinking socially for 2+ years and you start to see a lot less plastic vodka/Coors Light (except for beer games) and a lot more craft beer and more diverse liquors. Part of that is probably a signaling thing (“look at me, I have a more refined palette than you”) but I know that a lot of it is not. When I first started drinking, I didn’t like beer at all, and beers with more flavor tasted worse than “piss-water” beer for exactly that reason—they had more flavor. But after a couple of years, I really did enjoy nicer bottled beers a lot more than cheap cans of beer. I would never sit down and drink a Coors Light while watching a movie with a couple friends, but we would often buy a 12 pack of something nicer and drink that, and that decision was purely based on taste (even though the nicer beers are often more bitter than the Coors. They have a more complex taste profile which makes it more enjoyable.) Eventually, the ethanol in the beverage is not really tasted as much (at least for beverages in the 4 to 15% ABV range) and people come to appreciate the other flavors present and develop preferences around those.
Now I want to pose a related question to people who claim to enjoy the taste of certain alcohols that I think may be enlightening: Would you still drink your favorite alcohol if it tasted exactly the same, but didn’t have any inebriating effects whatsoever? Personally, I would not, and I would guess that the majority of people would agree with me. However, non-alcoholic beer and wine is sold and I know people (like my mother) who drink one or the other, and often a lot of it. However, many of them are former alcoholics (again, like my mother) so there is probably a more complex addiction- and reward-mechanism-related explanation, at least for my few datapoints.
To answer the other question though, I don’t really drink anymore personally—less than 10 times in the past year. I stopped because my hangovers started getting unbearable (really bad “physical” anxiety, like all the symptoms of a panic attack except that I know there’s nothing wrong and am not actually worrying about anything, just feeling miserable—headaches/shakiness/photosensitivity/rebound-hyperexcitation/the works). I’ll even get hangover symptoms an hour or two after having a single beer if I don’t keep drinking, so my only option is to binge drink so I sleep through the night. So these days, I NEVER drink alone and only drink when I’m in a social situation where everyone else is drinking and it would be really unpleasant to be the only sober person (drunk people are less annoying when you’re drunk too). I have to weigh the costs and ask myself “is it worth the hangover?” The answer is usually “No,” but after enough time of feeling like I’m missing out on all the fun, the answer will become “Yes” and then the timer resets after the hangover the next day. On those occasions where I do drink though, taste is definitely a factor and I like to get the most out of it and have a variety of really nice beers, which I enjoy thoroughly (though now, some of it may be scarcity effects, but I don’t think that’s a major factor).
I went to a party school for college (a top school in the US though) and was a pretty big partier, so hopefully I can offer the “general population perspective” as I think my early alcohol experiences are closer to that of an average person than to a typical LessWronger.
If you average all my years in college, I probably drank 3.5 or 4 days a week with about a quarter of those sessions to nearly blackout-level intoxication. In my experience, college-aged kids who are relatively new to drinking only care about the intoxicating effects. Since they’re not acclimated to the taste of alcohol yet, NO alcoholic drinks really taste good, which is why high school kids and college 1st years drink so much plastic-bottle vodka, usually mixed with or followed by something sugary like soda or a sports drink. Some kinds of alcohol will taste especially bad to new drinkers though, and some types require you to drink more volume to get the desired effect, which is a related selection factor, so there is some taste preference going on.
Fast forward a few years to late-college where people have been drinking socially for 2+ years and you start to see a lot less plastic vodka/Coors Light (except for beer games) and a lot more craft beer and more diverse liquors. Part of that is probably a signaling thing (“look at me, I have a more refined palette than you”) but I know that a lot of it is not. When I first started drinking, I didn’t like beer at all, and beers with more flavor tasted worse than “piss-water” beer for exactly that reason—they had more flavor. But after a couple of years, I really did enjoy nicer bottled beers a lot more than cheap cans of beer. I would never sit down and drink a Coors Light while watching a movie with a couple friends, but we would often buy a 12 pack of something nicer and drink that, and that decision was purely based on taste (even though the nicer beers are often more bitter than the Coors. They have a more complex taste profile which makes it more enjoyable.) Eventually, the ethanol in the beverage is not really tasted as much (at least for beverages in the 4 to 15% ABV range) and people come to appreciate the other flavors present and develop preferences around those.
Now I want to pose a related question to people who claim to enjoy the taste of certain alcohols that I think may be enlightening: Would you still drink your favorite alcohol if it tasted exactly the same, but didn’t have any inebriating effects whatsoever? Personally, I would not, and I would guess that the majority of people would agree with me. However, non-alcoholic beer and wine is sold and I know people (like my mother) who drink one or the other, and often a lot of it. However, many of them are former alcoholics (again, like my mother) so there is probably a more complex addiction- and reward-mechanism-related explanation, at least for my few datapoints.
To answer the other question though, I don’t really drink anymore personally—less than 10 times in the past year. I stopped because my hangovers started getting unbearable (really bad “physical” anxiety, like all the symptoms of a panic attack except that I know there’s nothing wrong and am not actually worrying about anything, just feeling miserable—headaches/shakiness/photosensitivity/rebound-hyperexcitation/the works). I’ll even get hangover symptoms an hour or two after having a single beer if I don’t keep drinking, so my only option is to binge drink so I sleep through the night. So these days, I NEVER drink alone and only drink when I’m in a social situation where everyone else is drinking and it would be really unpleasant to be the only sober person (drunk people are less annoying when you’re drunk too). I have to weigh the costs and ask myself “is it worth the hangover?” The answer is usually “No,” but after enough time of feeling like I’m missing out on all the fun, the answer will become “Yes” and then the timer resets after the hangover the next day. On those occasions where I do drink though, taste is definitely a factor and I like to get the most out of it and have a variety of really nice beers, which I enjoy thoroughly (though now, some of it may be scarcity effects, but I don’t think that’s a major factor).
Hope this was helpful to someone.
(Made minor edit for accuracy)