This is an idiotic question but what makes a drink alcoholic? Is it an ingredient? Do alcohol effects really differ depending on the drink?
Ok, I am going to go out on a limb here, at the risk of sounding stupid…
Do you mean a drink as in a screwdriver? In that case vodka makes it an alcoholic drink. What makes vodka alcoholic you ask? Fermented potatoes.
As far as the differences go, I always thought it was a myth, until a few weeks ago. I usually get my groove on with beer, and I am a happy (drunk) guy. However, a while back I was at a club, and thought I would have a few mixed drinks, instead of the standard beer.
To make a long story short, I had the drinks, and was my usual fun self…Except I didn’t think I was drunk. Everyone was telling me I was, but I didn’t believe it. I didn’t FEEL drunk.
The next day, through the pounding of my head, it occured to me that I had never seen a mean beer drinker. I am sure there are some, but for the most part they are jolly fools. Thus, I deducted that someone who has been drinking “straight” alcohol, may not think they are drunk, and naturally become more agitated when you try to convince them that they are. I.e., driving, fights, etc.
I’m not sure any of that made sense, and no I am not drunk now. 
Plato? Aristotle? Socrates? Morons!
~ And I know I wasn’t right, but it felt so good… -Better Than Ezra
Alcohol is an ingredient. When the label says “alcohol content 5.5%”, it means that 5.5% of the liquid, by weight, is ethyl alcohol.
Ethyl alcohol or ethanol is a compound with the chemical formula C[sub]2[/sub]H[sub]5[/sub]OH. It’s that “OH” at the end that makes it an alcohol.
Some people think different drinks have different effects on your mood. For example, champagne makes you nostalgic, gin makes you lachrymose, cider makes you bellicose, or whatever. I have my doubts.
Other alcohols may be present in drinks also in small quantities, such as amyl alcohol, other aliphatic alcohols (methanol - poisonous!). If so, these could add their own psychoactive effects to the main drunken experience.
Alchohol is yeast urine.
Or by volume. For some products/jurisdictions alcohol content is written in %-by-weight, and on others %-by-volume.
The relationship between the two is not very straight forward.
IIRC beer is (in Europe) normally sold as 4.5%[sub]volume[/sub], which is about 3.6%[sub]weight[/sub].
Things get more complicated in the general case.
[useless trivia] Mendelyeev (of periodic system fame) wrote his PhD thesis on alcohol concentrations[/useless trivia]
I started a thread on this subject a while back, but never got any answer.
If someone can shed some light on this it would be appreciated.
Alcohol os what makes you get drunk but other ingredients can definitely make your stomach feel bad. Whether they also affect your mood I dunno.
Ethanol makes drinks alcoholic. Ethanol is one of many chemicals that are called alcohols. Others include methanol (wood alcohol), isopropanol (rubbing alcohol), and butanol. Only ethanol is used in drinks. The other alcohols, while intoxicating, are also more poisonous than ethanol. As Reeder implies, alcohol is the final waste product produced by yeast when they eat sugar. The yeast also produce a variety of other chemicals, and these are responsible for much of the flavor of wines and beers. Some of these chemicals, such as methanol, can also cause hangovers if there is too much present.
The effects of alcohol on the body do not depend on whether the drink is wine, beer, or vodka, but the type of drink does affect how fast the alcohol gets out of the stomach and up to the brain. This leads to a variety of different drinking experiences.
I might add that there are two ways of producing ethanol industrially. The first is the fermentation of sugars as stated. The second is steam + ethene = ethanol.
point 1: already answered, ethanol etc
point 2: It is the other ingredients in alcoholic drinks that affect it. For instance, vodka is essentially just ethanol and water, with a few impurities, so vodka is quite a ‘clean’ drink. If you get a hangover from vodka, it is because you are dehydrated (alcohol dehydrates you. I won’t go into the details). In this case, to cure the hangover, you have to drink a lot of water before you go to bed, this stops you being dehydrated.
In theory, other drinks, eg wine, have a different affect on the feeling of being drunk because of all the other ingredients (eg tanin, grape juice etc.).
Also, because wine has many more impurities and toxins, it can give you a worse hangover if you drink an equivalent amount of alcohol to the vodka, as your body has more toxins to break down. So, its mostly the affect on your hangover that changes from drink to drink.
I just wanted to say I had my doubts as well… before I started drinking much. I will say that for whatever reason… some particular alcoholic beverages have a particular effect on me.
Most notably Tequila… I can drink most drinks and get drunk and I’m a generally happy drunk. I tend to completely lose that barrier that allows you to censor what you are saying. Tequila just does something to me that completely f**ks me up. I don’t know how to describe it, other than to say it si a completely different type of drunk than it is with any other alcohol.
For me its whiskey, I like it but when I have only been drinking whiskey and nothing else and getting really drunk on it, I tend to get really depressed rather then my usual happy drunk self.