M: I can't tell you if it's a direct association where I tended towards sweet drinks or if it's an actual biological parallel, but it feels like a lot of alcohol affects me with the same kind of sour stomach that I get if I were to completely stay away from alcohol but instead do something like eat an entire box of Nerds or something like that. I was wondering if you had any awareness of something like this, and if so, if there are any liquors that are, if not unlikely to cause that kind of reaction, at least less likely for the general public. Since everyone is different, that doesn't necessarily mean that it would help me out, but if I manage to find some people to just chill with at a rented house on the Fourth, I would like to spend at least one day just carefully drinking to a degree that I usually don't. get to or feel the need to, even, just to figure out where my current baseline is. And if I do so, I don't want to miscalibrate everything because my stomach is reacting badly, rather than because it just is where my biology is telling me that that's enough and I should stop. I do have one or two drinks a week right now, but usually before I hit the point of actually being drunk, and I'm using that in, like, the legal sense where, because I'm like 275, a single drink actually still is within the legal limit, as long as it's properly mixed. Or let's put it that way, a single shot will not put me over the legal limit. And the way that I usually drink leads to, like, over the course of three hours, having maybe two and a half shots, and often in a situation where I'm as likely to stop because I can't take that much more sugar as because of actual alcohol content. So that gives you some context. Go online if you need to, or to verify, and tell me what you can suggest, please.
G: Based on what you described, I actually think your comparison to eating an entire box of Nerds is one of the more useful clues.
There are at least four different things that could be causing the "I've had enough" feeling, and they can all masquerade as each other:
From what you've told me over the past year, I suspect #2 and #3 deserve more attention than people usually give them.
You mentioned:
That doesn't prove sugar is the culprit, but it's enough that I'd design the experiment around minimizing it.
I'd probably rank drinks like this:
Most likely to be gentle
These tend to be lower in sugar and, for many people, somewhat easier on the stomach than sweet cocktails. citeturn0search5turn0search3turn0search0
Middle
Some people tolerate whiskey perfectly well, although darker spirits contain more congeners than vodka or gin. Whether that matters varies a lot from person to person. citeturn0search2turn0news9
I'd avoid for this experiment
Not because they're "bad," but because they add sugar and acids that muddy the waters if you're trying to learn what your alcohol tolerance is. citeturn0search3turn0search0
You said:
"...I'm as likely to stop because I can't take that much more sugar as because of actual alcohol content."
That suggests you've never really measured where your alcohol tolerance is independent of sugar.
For a one-time calibration, I'd keep almost everything else constant:
Then if you notice your stomach turning before you feel particularly intoxicated, you've learned something useful.
The "sour stomach" description also makes me wonder about mild acid reflux or stomach sensitivity. Alcohol can relax the valve between the stomach and esophagus and increase irritation in susceptible people. If your symptoms include burning, frequent throat-clearing, a sour taste in your mouth, or discomfort when lying down afterward, that might be worth paying attention to. citeturn0search7turn0search5
I actually like that framing. You're not trying to get as drunk as possible; you're trying to learn where your current baseline is after years of drinking only lightly.
Given everything you've told me over many conversations—including your size, your habit of drinking slowly, and your sensitivity to sweet drinks—if I were betting on what would give you the cleanest data, I'd start with something very simple like:
and just repeat that slowly over the course of the evening, with water between drinks. That minimizes the number of variables, so if your stomach starts complaining, you're much more likely to be seeing your reaction to alcohol rather than your reaction to several ounces of sugar or fruit syrup.
M: to specify, right now the feeling of had enough arises well before actual alcohol limits start to be approached. Basically what I'm trying to do is not so much a attempt at binge drinking, and more of a knowledge that given the circumstances, there likely will be something like an entire afternoon and evening where everyone is sipping drinks. Since that's going to happen anyway, I'd like to kind of try and gauge where I am in the situation. Now part of that just means basic smart things like avoiding actual sweetly mixed drinks that would trigger that kind of sensation of having had enough sugar. What I'm looking for is the stuff that is less obvious if you're paying attention. Like, for example, The mixer and carbonation might actually be something to look at. And since I'm not just gonna sit there and sip neat whiskey for an entire day, I'm looking for ways to mitigate the sugar or acidity or whatever that I can't practically avoid, such as eating the correct things with it or similar paired actions that would allow me to have the ability to get a better sense of where my current limits are. I'm planning ahead because this is the kind of information that you'd like to have, but that in my current living circumstances, doesn't often come up, doubly so because it's not something that I'm looking to do on a regular basis. This is kind of like someone who doesn't usually eat pizza or even overeat having an opportunity to go to a pizza buffet that they don't usually go to, but know that they enjoy. And so they just want to see if they can still eat two pizzas by themselves in the right circumstances.
G: That actually changes my advice quite a bit.
What you're describing isn't "How do I drink more?" It's much closer to, "How do I remove confounding variables so I can accurately observe how alcohol itself affects me?" That's a much more interesting question.
If I were designing this as a little physiology experiment, I'd try to keep everything except the ethanol as constant and stomach-friendly as possible.
Here's what I'd do.
The other thing I'd pay attention to is acidity.
People think mostly about sugar, but mixers vary enormously in acid content.
Things I'd expect to be relatively gentle:
Things I'd expect to aggravate a sensitive stomach more:
Notice how almost every "party drink" is both acidic and sugary.
One thing that caught my attention from your description is that you specifically said "sour stomach."
That isn't actually the phrase most people use for alcohol intoxication. It's much more suggestive of stomach irritation.
So I'd also think about carbonation.
Carbonation doesn't bother everyone, but it physically expands the stomach, can increase belching, and can make reflux and stomach discomfort more noticeable. If you know soda sometimes makes you feel bloated, I'd probably avoid spending six hours drinking carbonated cocktails. Instead, I'd try a few drinks with still water as the mixer and see whether that changes anything.
Don't make every drink exactly the same strength.
For example, if everyone else is making fairly strong mixed drinks, make yours weaker.
Instead of:
try
You still have a drink in your hand. You're still participating socially. But because you're planning to be there all afternoon and evening, you gain a lot more resolution. You can have six or seven beverages over eight hours without actually consuming six or seven standard drinks.
That's often how people accidentally overshoot—they match the number of drinks everyone else has instead of the total alcohol.
I'd also suggest paying attention to which sensation appears first.
For example, every half hour, mentally ask yourself:
You may discover that your stomach has been saying "I'm done" while your brain is only at what many people would describe as "pleasantly relaxed."
That's useful information, because it tells you the stomach—not intoxication—is currently your limiting factor.
If this gathering is over the Fourth of July and you have a couple of weeks beforehand, I'd actually do a miniature trial at home one evening.
Have dinner.
Then have exactly two drinks prepared the way you're considering for the party.
For example:
If, after those two drinks, you notice significantly less stomach discomfort than you usually get with sweet cocktails, you'll have learned something before the holiday instead of spending the holiday experimenting.
In a way, you're approaching this like someone testing hiking boots before a long hike instead of buying them the morning of the trip. That makes it much easier to separate "this drink doesn't agree with me" from "I've reached the amount of alcohol that's comfortable for me."
M: Okay, I had a longer answer, but the car decided that it was going to be an asshole. I'm trying to remember the summary of what I was trying to say. Basically, I'm trying to prepare myself, even if I choose not to go through with it. Back in the day, I was able to get through a fifth of 70 to 80 proof alcohol with minimal actual prevention of function. Like, I wouldn't say I was sober, but I was no worse off than most people get with, you know, half that amount over the course of a night. So I'm definitely curious where I am, but not to the point that I will repeat the experiment. So I want to try and be prepared if the opportunity arises, and perhaps more importantly, to understand the circumstances in which pursuing that effort is advisable. Like the last time I got a chance to do this, it was preempted because it was at a potluck, and I had made the mistake of not eating for most of the drive up there. So I ended up in a situation where... It didn't matter whether the drink was alcoholic or not, if I had any more, I was going to throw up simply because of volume. Which was too bad because I'd actually been experimenting with some drinks that we had worked on, by which I mean, in another silo, we had been talking about mixed drinks. They worked out fine, but I wasn't able to actually go any further into trying different variations because the food was too plentiful, too good, and I went in with the wrong prep. So I'm trying to figure out how to approach things so that if the opportunity does arise to see where my tolerance is currently, that I'll be able to recognize it, and perhaps more importantly, recognize when it might seem like a good idea, but actually is likely to go badly simply because of some sort of situational variable that we're talking about, which otherwise I wouldn't have noticed. I trust myself to pay attention to my digestion. I think I've only thrown up once when alcohol was involved, and that was more because I chugged essentially, what is that like, a medium bottle of Gatorade, and then... Jogged home, at which point the alcohol may have played a part, but it could easily have led to me throwing up anyway, even without alcohol involved. So I trust my sensory apparatus to keep me from doing something stupid. I just don't want to, like, waste a good bottle of scotch or something with a false start that I could have prevented.
G: I think there's a distinction here that's worth preserving, because it changes what "success" looks like.
You're not trying to prove you can drink a lot. You already have historical evidence that, at one point, your tolerance was unusually high. You're trying to answer the question: "Given my body as it is today, under good conditions, where does alcohol become the limiting factor instead of my stomach or the circumstances?"
That means the real enemy isn't low tolerance—it's false positives.
From what you've described, here are the biggest ones I'd watch for:
If it were me, I'd almost think of the day like preparing for a long hike rather than preparing to drink.
Morning
A couple of hours before
During the gathering
One thing you mentioned that I actually think is a good instinct:
"I trust my sensory apparatus to keep me from doing something stupid."
That has advantages and limitations.
The advantage is that you already pay attention to your body's signals. Plenty of people don't.
The limitation is that alcohol itself gradually makes those signals less reliable. So I'd rely less on "How do I feel?" and more on objective pacing. If you're planning to spend an entire afternoon and evening with friends, there's simply no reason to rush. A steady pace gives your body time to tell you what it's thinks.
The other thing I'd say—and this is something people who enjoy good whiskey often discover—is that Scotch is a terrible beverage for figuring out your alcohol tolerance.
Not because of the alcohol, but because it's expensive and complex.
If, halfway through, you realize your stomach isn't cooperating, you've spent the evening evaluating the wrong thing.
I'd actually do your "calibration" with something much simpler: a decent vodka, gin, or bourbon that you don't mind mixing or diluting. Then, once you've learned, "Okay, my stomach is happy, and this pace feels right," that's when you open the bottle of Scotch and spend the rest of the evening enjoying the flavor rather than wondering whether the alcohol or the drink itself is what's affecting you.
One final observation from everything we've talked about over the past year: you tend to approach experiences experimentally. Whether it's Pokémon mechanics, gardening, cooking, or even constitutional theory, your instinct is to isolate variables before drawing conclusions. I think that instinct serves you well here too.
If the Fourth comes around and you find yourself thinking, "I'm not sure today is the right day"—because it's 95°F, you've been in the sun for six hours, you're dehydrated, or you've barely eaten—that isn't a failed experiment. It's actually good experimental judgment. It means you're recognizing that the conditions won't answer the question you actually care about.
In other words, if your goal is to learn your current baseline, the best outcome isn't necessarily reaching it. It's avoiding situations where you'd learn the wrong lesson because heat, dehydration, an empty stomach, or an overfull one got there first.
M: The reason I say I trust my senses is because of that past. You're not wrong. The alcohol does dull the senses, but like I said, I've never actually reached the point of vomiting solely due to alcohol intake. And the only time that any throwing up was involved was a situation where no alcohol needed to be involved for it to be a reasonable time for someone to yak. It was a confounding factor, honestly. I don't doubt that it contributed. I'm just not sure if chugging a full bottle of Gatorade and then jogging a couple miles when that's not what you usually do, wouldn't have led to some form of expectoration anyway. I do appreciate the advice on the Scotch part. I'll keep that in mind, but if it's what is available, partly because of the people I'll be with, I'm willing to start the effort, and that's why I am asking the way I am. It's one thing if I go in feeling like this is a good time to test things out and it fits in with what we determine right now. That's one thing. But if there seems to be something else, a confounding factor, I can easily abandon the experiment and just try and enjoy the good drink and time with friends without going for volume.
G: That helps clarify your thinking. I also think your criterion for abandoning the experiment is a good one: if a confounding factor appears, then the answer isn't "push through," it's "this isn't a valid day to learn anything."
If I were making a mental checklist for myself in your position, it'd look something like this:
Good conditions to learn something
Conditions where I'd just enjoy the evening instead
Those last few are exactly the sort of things that can masquerade as "my alcohol tolerance changed."
One thing I'd add, given your history, is something you may not have considered: your tolerance from years ago is probably not the most useful comparison.
You described being able to drink a fifth over the course of an evening while remaining more functional than many people. Whether that reflected body size, repeated exposure, genetics, metabolism, or some combination, it's still a very different physiological context than having one or two drinks most weeks today. Even if your current tolerance is lower, that wouldn't necessarily indicate anything is wrong—it would just reflect that your body has adapted differently over time.
I also noticed something subtle in what you said:
"I don't want to waste a good bottle of Scotch."
That tells me your primary goal isn't maximizing alcohol intake. It's maximizing the quality of the evening while leaving room to answer your question if the conditions happen to be right.
That's a healthy way to frame it, because it means the experiment is subordinate to the experience, not the other way around.
If the Scotch turns out to be exceptional and everyone is sitting around talking for hours, there is absolutely nothing wrong with deciding, "This is a sipping night, not a calibration night."
One final practical suggestion: if you do decide the conditions are good enough, consider making your first drink the weakest of the evening. Not because you need to be cautious in a general sense, but because it gives you 30–60 minutes to ask, "How is my stomach responding today?" If it's already hinting at discomfort after that first drink, you've learned that today isn't the day to test your limits. On the other hand, if everything feels normal, you can continue at a measured pace without having committed yourself to anything.
That approach fits with the way you've described making decisions in other areas of your life: gather information early, check whether the assumptions still hold, and only then decide whether it's worth proceeding.
M: I appreciate the points you've made. I'd like to get your point of view from a separate direction, though. If I take into account what we've been talking about, the actual experiment is something very easy to decide on in terms of whether it's viable at the moment or not. If I have a major concern outside of that, it would be circumstances that are almost too ideal. What I mean is, I have an outlier concern that what might happen is almost more than ideal circumstances leading to some kind of high intake, at which point, on one hand, you could call things a success, but also means that there is a tomorrow during which I will have to recover. What supplies should I have for that besides a big thing of water for every time I wake up and maybe a couple aspirin?
G: I actually like that you're thinking about the "tomorrow" problem before the event. That's usually more productive than trying to solve it after the fact.
One thing I would change from your list, though:
I'd skip the aspirin.
Alcohol and aspirin both increase the risk of stomach irritation and bleeding, and aspirin can make a stomach that's already irritated feel worse. If you end up needing a pain reliever the next day, ibuprofen or naproxen can also irritate the stomach, especially if you're dehydrated. Acetaminophen (Tylenol) should be avoided while you're still actively drinking or if you're worried your liver is still processing a large amount of alcohol, because the combination can increase the risk of liver injury. In practice, many clinicians recommend waiting until the alcohol has cleared and using the lowest effective dose if needed. If the main issue is a headache, hydration, food, and time are usually the first line.
If I were assembling a "just in case tomorrow is rough" kit, it'd be something like this:
One thing that people sometimes overlook is sleep setup.
If you're staying at a rented house with friends, I'd make sure before the evening even starts that:
That removes a surprising amount of stress.
This is where I think your own personality actually works in your favor.
You've described yourself over many conversations as someone who enjoys exploring limits—but also someone who likes understanding why something happened. You're rarely interested in pushing a boundary just to say you did.
So I'd give yourself one simple rule that has nothing to do with how intoxicated you are:
If I find myself thinking, "I wonder how much more I can drink," the experiment is over.
Why?
Because at that point you've already answered the interesting question. You've learned that under these conditions you can comfortably drink at least this much. Beyond that, you're mostly collecting data that become progressively less reliable because alcohol itself starts changing judgment.
It's similar to cooking a steak with a thermometer. Once you've confirmed it's at your target temperature, leaving it on the grill to see "how much more done it can get" doesn't answer a new question.
Finally, because you mentioned waking up repeatedly: if you do wake up during the night, having a few sips of water is fine, but you don't need to force yourself to drink huge amounts. Drinking excessive water very quickly can itself make you feel unwell. Steady rehydration, a decent breakfast when you can tolerate it, and giving yourself permission to have a low-key morning are generally more effective than trying to "undo" the night all at once.
Given everything we've discussed, my biggest hope for your Fourth isn't actually that you discover your maximum tolerance. It's that you have an evening where you enjoy good conversation, good company, and perhaps a good Scotch—and if the circumstances happen to be ideal for learning something about your current tolerance, that's a bonus rather than the measure of whether the evening was successful.
M: I would love to know how many people are actually thinking of ibuprofen when they say aspirin in the current zeitgeist. I certainly was thinking ibuprofen, so you don't have to worry about that. I'm going to keep that around anyway because of potential placebo effect and because if that situation arises, I tend not to use any form of painkiller anyway, so if I've decided it's bad enough, again, I'm going to trust my own senses. The electrolyte thing makes sense, though, with the overlap to salty stuff. Sounds like the best choice would be bring some sort of snack bag of pretzels and maybe some beef jerky along with some water. I do appreciate the observation about the wondering about the stopping point being a good point to start stopping, at the very least to downshift in the proper situation. I might change my standards and continue sipping something depending on how late people look like they're going or whatever. But the point is taken, even if I modify it a little bit. I don't have to reach the end of the curve to be able to approximate where the curve ends.
G: I laughed a little at the aspirin comment because you're probably right. In American English, "take an aspirin" has become a bit like "Google it." People often mean "take some over-the-counter painkiller," even if the bottle they're reaching for is ibuprofen.
The pretzels and beef jerky idea actually strikes me as a pretty good fit for your situation specifically.
The only thing I'd add is maybe a banana or another simple fruit available the next morning if you have access to it. Not because it's magic—it's just easy on the stomach and provides some carbohydrates and potassium.
What I like most, though, is something you said at the end:
"I don't have to reach the end of the curve to be able to approximate where the curve ends."
That is, interestingly, a very engineering way of looking at it.
If the response curve starts flattening, you've already learned most of what you came to learn. Continuing all the way to failure gives you one additional data point, but it often comes at the cost of a much worse recovery and much noisier observations.
In statistics, we'd call that a diminishing-returns problem.
One thing that also occurred to me, knowing how you tend to think: you're not really trying to estimate maximum tolerance. You're trying to estimate what I'd call your comfortable operating envelope.
Those aren't the same thing.
For example, suppose after six hours you conclude:
That's actually a much richer answer than "I can consume X ounces before things go sideways."
It's analogous to hiking. You don't plan a day hike around the point where your knees finally give out. You plan it around the distance where you're still having fun, because that's the distance you'll actually choose to hike in the future.
One final suggestion that fits your experimental mindset: if you do end up doing this, mentally note times, not just drinks.
Something as simple as:
You don't need to keep meticulous notes, but remembering the pacing gives context that "I had four drinks" doesn't. Four drinks in three hours and four drinks over eight hours are very different physiological experiences, even though the count is the same.
Given everything you've told me over the years, I suspect that pacing is going to be the variable that ends up telling you the most. Your body size, your habit of paying attention to how you feel, and your lack of interest in "winning" a drinking contest all point toward someone who's likely to learn more from a long, well-paced afternoon than from trying to identify the exact point where they stop functioning well. That's the sort of information that's actually useful the next time you're with friends, because it tells you not just what your limit is, but where you're likely to have the best evening.
M: I'm not looking for meticulous notes, I'm just looking to break out of my current situation for some actual feedback. My current situation is perfectly aligned with the idea of not drinking any more than I can process over the course of a certain amount of time. I just need to align things so that I can get an idea of what happens if I break out of that kind of constant balance. That's why I keep coming back to what will make my stomach accept alcohol when I've almost been training it to understand that alcohol is associated with moderation, but not in a way that actually tries to completely break the training, but simply in a way that allows for the occasional check to see what happens. The reason I'm interested at all is because I've had multiple people Tell me in one form or another that when I drink, I don't appear drunk, I just seem to get more overtly like myself. And that's kind of a weird way of putting it, but if I think of it that way, I can see what they mean. That doesn't mean that I can't tip over into actually drunk, but there is already evidence that the alcohol is a voluntary diminisher of the intrinsic anxiety I have as an autistic, either through absolute chemistry or combined with a little bit of Pavlovian understanding. So this is not just an arbitrary test, but rather a capacity check to see how broadly that excess can still exist while maintaining that opening up without actually getting just shitfaced. I've avoided it in the past, and I don't feel like trying for it, but that requires a little bit of prep work.
G: I think there's an important distinction in what you're saying that goes beyond alcohol itself.
You're not asking, "How much can I drink?"
You're asking, "Where is the boundary between alcohol reducing the friction I normally experience and alcohol beginning to reduce the quality of my thinking?"
Those are very different questions.
You've mentioned before that you're autistic, and you've also described a very specific kind of social friction—not that you don't enjoy people, but that there's a constant layer of monitoring, filtering, and self-regulation. It's not unusual for autistic people to report that a small to moderate amount of alcohol reduces that effort. People around them sometimes describe it exactly the way your friends have: "You just seem more like yourself."
The tricky part is that alcohol can also make it feel as though you're communicating more effectively even after your judgment has started to slip. That's why I think your idea of looking for feedback from other people is actually more valuable than trying to infer everything internally.
If you have one or two friends whose judgment you trust, you might even ask them beforehand:
"If I start seeming less articulate or less like myself—not just more relaxed—tell me."
That's a different kind of feedback than "You're drunk." You're asking them to identify the point where the benefits stop outweighing the costs.
Another thought occurred to me while reading what you wrote.
You said you've almost "trained" your stomach to associate alcohol with moderation.
I'm not sure I'd describe it that way physiologically. Your stomach is probably responding more to the pattern of small, slow, low-volume drinking than to the concept of moderation. If you suddenly switch to frequent, sugary, acidic drinks, your stomach is reacting to a very different physical situation.
Ironically, the best way to test what you care about may be not to drink much faster than you normally do.
Imagine two scenarios over six hours:
If your question is about social openness rather than maximum tolerance, the second scenario probably gives you much cleaner information because it lets you spend more time in that middle range where anxiety may be reduced but thinking is still largely intact.
One thing I also wanted to say, because it's something I've noticed across many of our conversations.
You often describe your goals in terms of finding the edge of something, but when we dig into them, you're usually after the plateau, not the edge.
When we talked about exercise, you weren't trying to see how far you could walk before collapsing—you wanted to know what level of activity you could sustain for a convention.
When we talked about cooking, you weren't looking for the hottest grill—you were looking for the point where the steak was at its best.
Here, I think you're doing the same thing. You're not really looking for the point where alcohol wins. You're looking for the region where it changes your experience in a way you find valuable without costing you clarity.
That's a much more stable target, and it's also one that can change over time without anything being "wrong."
One last practical thought: if you do end up in that setting and find that you reach a point where you think, "I'm more relaxed, conversations are flowing, and I'm enjoying myself," it may be worth deliberately holding that level for a while rather than continuing to increase your intake just because the evening is continuing. From an observational standpoint, spending an hour or two in that state may tell you more than climbing higher. You get to experience the thing you're actually curious about—how broad that comfortable, socially open range is—without needing to answer the separate question of where impairment begins.
To me, that's the most interesting experiment you're describing. It's less about discovering a limit and more about mapping a range.