I was talking to my neighbor the other night who claimed that wine and beer affect him differently. I expressed skepticism but he had some pseudo-scientific sounding explanation prepared, which I proceeded to immediately forget. I don’t want to write it off though in case there is some truth behind it.
Assuming an equal amount of alcohol is ingested, is there an appreciable difference between intoxication from beer, wine, and liquor (that is within the same person), and if so why?
No, apart from the cultural conditioning which might lead one to act as though there were. But alcohol is alcohol.
That was my assumption. In the OP I posit an equal amount of alcohol is consumed, but due to their different concentrations I also have to speculate that perhaps some people end up drinking more or less with one kind of beverage than the other and don’t realize it, which might contribute to this belief that “wine drunk” is different than “beer drunk”.
I think it’s possible that wine is more likely consumed with food.
Sure, but that doesn’t preclude the possibility that there are other chemicals in the beverages that act upon someone
Tannins in wine, especially, are thought to exacerbate hangovers so it’s not entirely impossible that the experience of drinking these beverages is different.
I think you have to look at the concentration of alcohol in the beverage, too. A six-pack of beer is 72 oz of liquid, while six shots only six. I don’t think it is much of a stretch to say that six shots gets you drunker faster (and hence differently), even if you account for the fact that it takes longer to drink six beers than six shots.
Your body will absorb the alcohol at a different rate depending on the concentration, right? Hell, the one time I drank Everclear straight, it was absorbed near-instantaneously by the membranes in my mouth, and I ended up swallowing almost nothing.
Thus speaks someone who’s never drunk tequila.
This…assuming you are drinking fluid at a steady rate for whatever reason, then drinking beer will make you silly while drinking liquor will make you blindly stupid.
If you are drinking beer, you will naturally slow down as your stomach becomes bloated/full.
Yes, that’s all fair enough. I had been taking “Assuming an equal amount of alcohol is ingested” to implicitly mean at an equal rate, but, of course, that’s not usually true of the way people generally drink.
The fact that there is no physical reason for responding to equal amounts of alcohol, under otherwise equal conditions, does not mean that your neighbour does not in some sense experience this. His psychological and physiological responses partially depends on the manner that he thinks he will respond, especially if he has an underlying, although pseudo-scientific, basis for his beliefs. Numerous psychological experiments have confirmed that people’s behavioural response to drugs, such as alcohol, can be modified according to arbitrarily suggested test outcomes, or in line with conceived social norms.
I think Cecil did a Straight Dope on this very subject a while back (also covering what specific kinds of alcohol cause the meanest hangover) and seemed to find it (getting more hammered on say vodka vs. merlot) was a mostly subjective phenomenon, though he did seem to think that some alcohol was (possibly) found to cause worse after-effects…
Its been years since I read this column, so I may be mis-remembering (or drunk)
And then there’s wildly differing amounts of sugar. I suspect a Hurricane has as much sugar as a bowl of frosted sugar bombs breakfast cereal, and most parents know what that can do to a human being.
I wonder what the impact of all the carbs in a good beer is? It could be that a controlled experiment is required…
But how long will it stay controlled? 
Rot their teeth?
Lots of parents speak anecdotally of “sugar rushes”, but my understanding was that this concept has never panned out when put to scientific test.
Here’s an article with some answers:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2006/dec/12/foodanddrink.healthandwellbeing\
Here’s a previous thread:
Fixed link to above Guardian article:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2006/dec/12/foodanddrink.healthandwellbeing
Thanks, C_A
Tequila makes me burp. So there’s a different kind of drunk - the burpy kind and the regular kind.
When I was a bartender, I had two different customers in two different cities that older bartenders warned me about. " Serve them beer - but never (one was scotch, one was tequila)"
What I noticed was, if they drank enough beer, long enough, they were still assholes. It just took longer.
I seem to get some additional good feeling when drinking nice wine. I think there is something in a good Cab beyond just the alcohol, but of course that is just a subjective opinion.