Hiding in the woods covered in sweat and vomit was when I began to hate drinking. The school security guard jogged up the trail behind my high school, yelling for me to come out. Like some bad thrasher movie, I drunkenly knocked over a branch and his head snapped in my direction. Barely eighteen, with 2 weeks left of my senior year, I did what any not so juvenile delinquent would do, I ran. Halfway down the football field towards the suburban side streets off-campus, I felt the taste well up in my throat again, and I began puking, the wind throwing my half-digested chicken nuggets and chocolate milk flying back at me and over my head, like fluid when you clean your windshield on the highway. Reaching the gate, I ran down the street, looking back to see the security guard give up the chase. After spending the next 3 hours sitting Indian-style in front of the toilet, I vowed never to drink again.

By the next weekend, my vow was all but forgotten. The vomiting and cursing my decision making skills was an almost weekly ritual for me, leading to nothing but bloodshot eyes, black and blue marks, and a series of absolutely horrifying adolescent sexual experiences. I wouldn't trade those memories for anything.

I'm now well into my twenties, and thinking back on all of the horrible teenage drinking that I did, I can't help but cringe. I drank more Southern Comfort than a used car salesman, mixed alcohol with liquids that should never be considered mixers (pickle juice, anyone?), and bought any liquor sold in a plastic bottle (no tell-tale clinking sound when hidden in a backpack). I was a teenage alcoholic in the sense that I only drank things designed to get you drunk.

College was more of the same. Cheap whiskey with anachronistic names and ugly brown labels. Liquor was what we drank when we couldn't get drugs. A cheap way to fuck ourselves up that had less downside than trying to trip off a bottle of cough syrup. Simply a means to an end. The end being: get amazingly drunk in the company of other amazingly drunk people, and hopefully end up with a forgetful hook-up, followed by a restless night in a crowded twin bed.

Post-college, being in a series of ridiculous punk and rock 'n roll bands, you drink two things: Jack Daniels and Pabst Blue Ribbon. Oh, and maybe a shot of Jameson if it was an open bar. Not to disparage any of them, but it's not exactly drinking for taste.

I'll still have a PBR on occasion, but working on Lush Life has taught me that there is a huge difference between a Rum and Coke and a glass of small batch bourbon. After years of drinking cheap horrible gin, I can have Hendricks or Plymouth and taste something other than the chemical bite from the inside of the plastic bottle. And that's the whole point of the show and website, to get you to drink better. There is definitely a place for teenage, college, and dive bar drinking, and I'm not attacking any of them, but as I get older, I prefer my whiskey in a rocks glass rather than a shot.

And if that makes me a sellout or a wuss, you drink a glass of George T. Stagg straight and get back to me.