Hold my beer

Day 13

First night out with drinks included in 2023. I guess that's a new record for me 😅.

I'm not a hardcore drinker anymore but I do enjoy a good drink occasionally nowadays. In my 37 years I've had plenty on drunken nights but getting wasted is not something I look forward to anymore, that said, if I have to drink, I will drink and will drink the whole time.

The thing is that you cannot improvise experience, and that's a hard lesson to learn, but once you do, you are happy that you do, and with drinks, thankfully I learned mine and right on time since I was never any kind of dangerous situation because of the alcohol (I think). I cannot really recall exactly when I started drinking, but growing up in DR you start fairly early and by the time I was a teenager me and my friends were getting "wasted" with cheap rum.

As time went by, I went from cheap rum, to beer, to better rum and eventually whiskeys. For many years that was my preferred drink: if cheap whiskey I would mix it with Sprite/7up and top shelf then on the rocks.

But you know, drinking that can make a dent in your pocket and once I moved to Miami, money was extremely short and major responsibilities fell over me (paying for rent, food, services etc) and drinking became a hard hobbie to keep soI had to make some changes, the big one being changing from whiskey and top shelf rum to beer.

Hard liquor and beer couldn't be more different but there's something about beer culture that I find really appealing and maybe it was the exposure to a bigger market and better variety of them.

In Santo Domingo you had pretty much two to choose from: Presidente, the undeniable leader and Quisqueya. Eventually a new brand like Soberana or Brahma will be in the market, but they all have one thing in common: they were Pilsner type.

I don't have anything against it, but I didn't know better about the different types and flavors, so I started visiting craft breweries, specialty shops and trying many different types of beers every time I could and nowadays, I can definitely say that beer is my preferred drink even though it does bloat me 😢.

Do I have a preferred type? Obviously, nothing beats a Hefeweizen, and I won't argue with anybody about this.

Just a side note: my friends still hate to drink with me. They have always complained that I drink too fast, and it is a bad habit that I haven't been able to stop.

There are many stories about drinks and beer to be told, like the one time I blacked out, but those will be another day.