Literary hangover

The New Yorker dedicates five pages to the hangover. Most of the information is not new, but there are some interesting cultural anecdotes:

Elsewhere on the international front, many people in Asia and the Near East take strong tea. The Italians and the French prefer strong coffee. (Italian informant: add lemon. French informant: add salt. Alcohol researchers: stay away from coffee—it’s a diuretic and will make you more dehydrated.) Germans eat pickled herring; the Japanese turn to pickled plums; the Vietnamese drink a wax-gourd juice. Moroccans say to chew cumin seeds; Andeans, coca leaves. Russians swear by pickle brine. An ex-Soviet ballet dancer told me, “Pickle juice or a shot of vodka or pickle juice with a shot of vodka.”

...and a bit of discussion on what cures may work and why. Many of them one researcher dismisses as distraction cures:

Many of the cures probably work, she said, on the same distraction principle as the hair of the dog: “Take the spicy foods, for example. They divert the body’s attention away from coping with the alcohol to coping with the spices, which are also a toxin. So you have new problems—with your stomach, with your esophagus, with your respiration—rather than the problem with the headache, or that you are going to the washroom every five minutes.” The high-fat and high-protein meals operate in the same way, she said. The body turns to the food and forgets about the alcohol for the time being, thus delaying the hangover and possibly alleviating it.

Milk thistle as a liver helper comes up again. That's the only thing this article made me consider changing about my lifestyle. Lately, I've hardly been experiencing any hangovers. I attribute this not so much to reduced alcohol intake, but to two factors: 1. Drinking in venues where they serve a glass water with drinks. 2. Not staying out too late. I've noticed that even when not drinking heavily I feel worse after a late night out than I do after an early one with many cocktails. The New Yorker story mentions Kingsley Amis, the British writer of three books on drinking that were recently compiled into one volume called Everyday Drinking. I have the book, and it's a riot. The Wall Street Journal's Eric Felten also wrote about this book in a story last weekend called The Hangover Artist. Esquire's David Wondrich also reviews the book in the June issue. He says, "Kingsley Amis’s drink writing is better than anybody else’s, ever -- even though there wasn’t a single cocktail or category of booze he could write about without making a grievous factual error." Playboy takes on Amis as well, saying that in the book, "Many quaffs are more interesting in theory than in practice... but the old boy is charming enough to make you think about trying them anyway. " They include a recipe for the Salty Dog, a cocktail with gin, grapefruit juice, and salt.

Hangovers

Chow.com has an informative and actually useful story on hangover helpers. Most articles on this subject suck, but the Traci Vogel pulls the science together with the urban legends. Personally, I think Alka-Seltzer's Morning Relief is an excellent product, combining stomach-settling fizziness with headache-reducing aspirin and caffeine. I have a hard time tolerating coffee if I'm hungover but I'll have the caffeine headache without it. I do several of those other things too (greasy food, mostly) and I'm glad to see many of the cures I've improvised scientifically justified. Obviously, prevention is the best cure. It's surprising how many people in the comments to the article say, "I tried drinking water the night before and it really helps!" I didn't realize this wasn't common knowledge. Maybe some liquor companies should mention this on their websites rather than the now-generic 'enjoy our product responsibly' tagline they all use. Also, one thing very few articles mention (it's unseemly, I guess) is that having an orgasm really helps soothe a hangover. There, I said it.

Cocktailing with Cameron Bogue, Part Two

So anyway, Cameron Bogue, Smirnoff Cocktail Consultant and I went out drinking in San Francisco. He had a map of all the places he wanted to visit but we didn't get all that far because we stayed too long at every place we did visit. Slanted Door- We were lucky enough to visit SD on a night when bar manager Erik Adkins was working, as he loves to talk shop and mix up a lot of drinks. (Both times when I spent more than 20 minutes talking with Erik I had more than six drinks in front of me, which seems normal to me but customers started making comments...) We tried a rhum agricole punch topped with grated nutmeg that was just great. I had a Casino, which is an Aviation with added orange bitters. These bitters were the homemade ones that I wrote about in the Chronicle, finally put to good use. They were also experimenting with homemade ginger beer, as Erik went off the menu and whipped us up so many more drinks. Eventually we had to flee as we had dinner reservations. Absinthe- Absinthe also has a Casino cocktail on their menu, so it turns out that I'm right about the Aviation being the new Negroni. We had a few other drinks with dinner there that were tasty, and I don't remember what they were but they were all terrific. Bourbon & Branch- It turns out that Cameron knows Todd Smith, and had considered working at B&B when it was going to open. That would have been stupendous. Anyway, we had several drinks and all were tasty. They've been brining their own olives for a while now, but recently made a brine with smoked salt and I think scotch. The smoky olives were fantastic, though I think they could find a better vehicle for them than a gin martini. In other news, Todd says that they're bringing back the Rouge No. 10 when strawberries are in season. Hooray! Rye- Normally Rye never dissapoints, but the execution of the cocktails we had there this time was off so we went back to B&B for a nightcap that I really didn't need but thought was a good idea at the time. The next day I was horribly, miserably, shamefully hungover. But I had a text message from Cameron before I'd crawled out of bed as they were headed to LA around 8AM. Yep, the guy is a pro.

Hair of the Dog

For hangovers, bartenders prefer the 'hair of the dog'

Camper English, Special to The Chronicle

Friday, December 29, 2006

Most readers will glance at the following two sentences and ignore the advice in them, so perhaps it's best to skip this first paragraph altogether. The best way to cure a hangover is to avoid getting one. Standard suggestions for hangover prevention include drinking in moderation, drinking a glass of water between every cocktail, eating plenty of food so that alcohol absorbs through the stomach lining at a slower rate, and not mixing different kinds of alcohol during your night out drinking.

Now that we've got that out of the way, let's face facts: On Jan. 1, plenty of people will be hurting from overindulgence the previous evening. Hangovers are a fully preventable condition that most of us forget to prevent. We needn't feel terribly bad about having one (focus the guilt on what you said to your ex last night) because even people who work with alcohol on a daily basis slip up occasionally and pay the price, just like the rest of us.

We asked a few Bay Area bartenders who should know better than to get a hangover in the first place what they do to make them go away.

Read the rest of my hangover story in today's Chronicle here.

Here's a new one...

AXE Shower Gel has released a hangover soap. Hangover Soap! AXE Recovery Gel with "invigorating electrolytes." I guess this is the guy answer to shampoos with ginseng.