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Fun Alcohol Facts

›Slang terms for distilled alcohol include “aqua vitae,” “ardent spirits,” “belt,” “booze,” “firewater,” “giggle juice,” “grog,” “hard stuff,” “hooch” (refers to it being homemade), “John Barleycorn,” “liquid courage,” “moonshine” (made by the light of the moon), “nightcap,” “sauce,” “snort,” “swill,” “swish,” “tipple,” “toddy,” and “tot”.

›In the United Kingdom, it is legal for children to drink at home with their parents from age six and up. They can be in a pub if accompanied by a parent and, at age sixteen, drink beer or wine in a pub with their parents.

›Dr. David Kimball, lead historian at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, found a 1787 farewell party bar tab for George Washington in 1985. The bar tab showed that fifty-five attendees drank sixty bottles of claret, fifty-four bottles of Madeira, eight bottles of whiskey, twenty-two bottles of porter, eight bottles of hard cider, twelve bottles of beer, and seven bowls of alcoholic punch.

›According to Wikipedia, the country that drinks the most alcohol in the world is the Republic of Belarus, which is bordered by Russia, Poland, Ukraine, Latvia, and Lithuania. The country that drinks the most spirits is Haiti.

›The youngest drinking age in the world is sixteen and the oldest is twenty-five. There are twenty-three countries whose drinking age is sixteen years old (a couple include Cuba and Switzerland), and there are seven states in India where the drinking age is twenty-five. Alcohol is illegal in thirteen countries.

›The alcohol drinking habits of vervet monkeys were studied on St. Kitts island (where the monkeys stole drinks from sunbathing tourists). They learned that the monkeys’ drinking behaviors were similar to humans’: teetotaler, social drinker (the majority, who only drink with other monkeys), regular drinker, and binge drinkers that will drink themselves into a coma or death.

›Whiteclay, Nebraska, has a population of fourteen. They also have four liquor stores and their yearly beer sales are $3 million (the county next to them is dry).

›All Playboy bunnies working at Playboy Clubs were required to know 143 brands of liquor.

›Make your own flexible ice packs to keep in the freezer with your choice of plain vodka, gin, rum, tequila, or whiskey. Simply pour a cup of water and a cup of spirit into a freezer plastic bag, squeeze out the air, then seal. Seal that bag into another bag, then place in the freezer. Since the spirit will not freeze solid, it will create a flexible, slushy consistency.

›Finding the proof of a spirit dates back to the 1500s. They discovered if you soak a pellet of gunpowder in the spirit and the gunpowder could still burn, the spirits were rated above proof. In the 1800s, the gunpowder test was replaced by a specific-gravity test.