Sheez!
The question isn’t really answerable without context.
If it’s commonplace for your breakfast to include spirits, it’s a fairly safe bet your alcohol consumption is problematic.
On the other hand, I wouldn’t be terribly ashamed to have a scotch & soda for breakfast while on vacation, after sleeping in until the early afternoon. The idea doesn’t sound terribly appealing to me, though.
My regular breakfast regimen is three cups of coffee, (and sometimes a joint,) which I imagine is considerably less healthy than starting each day with a half an ounce of ethanol, assuming that that was your total intake for the day, and not just a running jump.
The idea of consuming solids within the first five hours of consciousness is constitutionally abhorrent to me.
I’ve had champagne & orange-juice for breakfast, many, many times-- never alone, though. I can’t see any logical reason to believe that scotch & soda is somehow worse.
I don’t drink, never have, so I have no personal stake in this.
I never understood the stigma against drinking in the morning. I mean, I think I understand the reasoning behind the stigma—if you get started that early and keep drinking and drinking and drinking all day, that’s obviously a problem.
But what if you drink in moderation (by most people’s standards) but you just happen to choose to drink in the morning? Is this a problem, merely because it’s the morning? I don’t see how.
In the state of Texas, I am not allowed to serve you an alcoholic beverage before noon on Sundays unless it is accompanied by food. When I first started bartending, working a lot of crappy day shifts, I was vaguely astonished to realize how often this would come up; people would come in at ten to eleven on a Sunday morning, and demand a drink.
Often it was either a mimosa or a Bloody Mary; for some reason these are more societally acceptable “brunch” beverages.
But other times it was a mixed drink, or a draft beer, or a glass of wine…and you knew these people just woke up because they were on vacation. I would like to think that they didn’t begin every day at home with a similar beverage, but maybe I’m naive. (And they’d get really annoyed when they found out they had to order something to eat; usually I’d just placate them with free breadsticks.)
I would find no problem with a scotch and soda for breakfast, as long as it was tried out of curiosity, or the odd whim, or because you’re trying a bit of the hair of the dog. We have all had those ugly morning afters; sometimes you’ll try just about anything.
If it became a morning ritual, I’d see a problem, but no more so than if you made it a nightly ritual. People who drink every day, out of habit, usually have a problem. What time of day is really immaterial.
Larry Mudd is right; needs context. It doesn’t sound like a problem if you saw it as a lark and didn’t follow it with a quart of gin or something. One has had wonderful days with Bloody Marys or (especially) mimosas for breakfast. The (infrequent) days that start with mimosas always turn out to be great days, in my experience.
Then again, if it’s “wake up, have a drink, brush teeth” every day, then: Yes. Problem. Capital-P. Seek help.
[hijack]I sometimes fly to the US on business, and go down to breakfast after checking into the hotel or in transit in the San Fran airport, and ask for a beer with breakfast around say 7 or 8 am. I get a lot of funny looks and have been refused once.
Of course, I just finished a 20 hour transit, its about Midnight where I come from, and you can’t get a microbrew, so I’d really like an anchor steam. But I can imagine what the servers are thinking…[/hijack]
Badtz, after having read many of your posts, asking this question sure raises a warning flag.
[Kris Kristofferson]
The beer I had for breakfast wasn’t bad,
So I had one more for dessert.
[/Kristofferson]
From your description above, it doesn’t sound like too much of a problem. Like others have said, as long as it isn’t a usual thing, it probably doesn’t mean much in isolation. I think the type of morning drinking scott evil mentioned is the kind of morning drinking that is problematic, not the occasional Bloody Mary, mimosa, or even Scotch and soda.
By context I mean asking yourself (and I am not looking for you to answer here, btw) if you see other worrisome things like:
- You think you should cut down, but can’t seem to do it.
- Others telling you that you drink too much, they are worried, etc.
- Blackouts
- You keep drinking despite legal problems with drinking.
- You keep drinking despite social or work problems caused by drinking.
If you see these other things, you should probably look into this more carefully.
I don’t drink all that much, but I do like gin and tonics at parties and a beer or two at dinner if eating out. Having said that the notion of a mixed alcoholic drink at breakfast is really too much to consider. Having been heavy (and not) in my life and not all that far from your mark, I have a bit of a different take on why it might have seemed like a good idea to you. At my heaviest my brain chemistry and outlook toward food was different and I tried foods out of sheer desire to consume and taste new things continuously. I ate and drank things while heavy that now seem insane in retrospect.
I don’t really think that incipient alcoholism is really your problem. Consumption and the urgent desire to consume are the issue and a scotch and soda seemed like an interesting new thing to taste. Not that a compulsion to consume is all that much more desirable than being an alcoholic. Good Luck.
im havign a beeer rite now. no prolbem.
What kind of alcoholic are you then?
C’mon, you had to see that one coming! 
Now, THAT’S funny.
I don’t drink very often, and almost never in the evening, since alcohol makes me sleepy. As a result, I’m the “permanent designated driver” for my particular group of bar-hopping pals.
However, the time when I do enjoy a beer (or a bloody mary or a margaritta) is about 9 or 10 am, when I have no work to do and nowhere to go. At that time of day, I don’t get sleepy, just relaxed. And, as a side benefit, I thoroughly enjoy “shocking” my friends by tipping a beer in the morning, since they are used to seeing me act rowdy while polishing off glass after glass of ice water.
The usual situation in which I indulge myself in “dangerous morning drinking” is on vacation, especially when camping. Ahhh…breakfast cooked over the campfire followed by an ice cold beer. Life doesn’t get a lot better. I’d say once or twice a year, I’ll have a beer all by myself on a Saturday morning.
So, count me as another vote for “sure, it’s ok, as long as there’s not a context of problem drinking.”
Badtz - I like to think I know a teeny bit about you, I’ve read your posts for over two years now. So I’m taking this question in the context of what I know about you. I know you’ve had a very, very difficult year with your family. I know you’ve had a tendency to drink heavily in the past, to binge drink. I’m going to go out on a limb here and I really hope you don’t mind but I think you’re worried you may have crossed some line here.
As others have said, having a drink first thing in the morning only indicated a problem according to the context around it. You need to ask yourself if you feel it’s a problem and if so, why?
Yes, I think it does.
If you think so too, I hope you will find the strength to quit.
The real question here is, “How do you feel about drinking in the morning?”
If you answer from the heart, and if your answer is affirmative, i.e. Drinking in the morning is a problem., then you must quit.
When I asked myself similar questions, years ago, I found that in addition to the affimative answer, I also asked myself, “How did things become so bad for me? What did I ever do to screw my life up this bad? Why is my life so miserable compared to what I expected?”
I knew I had to quit.
I did too, and for me, it wasn’t tough. I had tried before, and each attemp was indeed tough, but when I finally came to grips with the imperative that I must quit, I simply did so.
I apologize if I’m bringing you down. I don’t mean to. I’m an optimist myself. As I type this, I’m thinking, "You can do this. You can take control of your life again.
On the other hand, if you don’t believe drinking in the morning is a bad thing, I wish you the best of luck. I respectfully disagree, but it’s your life sir.
I’m pretty much the same way. I don’t get hungry until I have been awake about 6 or 7 hours, and if I eat right after waking I’ll feel sick to my stomach later.
Exactly. It’s the context, not the drink- if it’s the occasional drinker having a mimosa at brunch, no-one cares. But if it was, say, me hitting the bottle I hid under the bed the night before so no-one would steal it… Things that make you go “hmmmmm…” But IAAA, so YMMV! 
Badtz, if you are in trouble, you know it in your gut and don’t have to ask us.
scott evil, glad to hear about your 4 months, welcome back! My birthday was this month, I hope we’ll be seeing your birthday thread in December!
In the Czech Republic, a beer and/or a shot of Fernet (some nasty herbal liquor supposedly good for digestion) with a bread roll is a common breakfast for menial labour types. Yes, construction workers who will operate heavy machinary will down 2 drinks for breakfast, 2 beers for lunch, and then 6 beers for dinner.
Badtz, you wrote this on Saturday morning? No work, just play that day? Then no problemo. Although I would say that a workday morning drink before you go to the office is a problem. No one really drinks alcohol at lunch anymore, so I doubt breakfast would be acceptable.
-Tcat
I’m going to have to agree with the post above, Single Malt neat in a nice clean glass. Serving good Scotch any other way is just a sin. Feel free to do as you will with the well liquor though.
But what’s Scotch for breakfast without some Scotch Eggs (hard boiled eggs surrounded by sausage and deep fried). If we’re going against society’s conventions, lets go all the way.
I would suspect that a drink in the morning was stigmatized because one reason for morning drinking is to kill a hangover.
Drinking to cure a hangover is pretty much diagnostic of alcoholism. IMO.
Regards,
Shodan