The Drinking Life Cycles of Every Bro

Like your run-of-the-mill housefly or your Aunt’s shitty cat, every Bro’s drinking choices have a life cycle. We drink certain things when we’re young, evolve our tastes to conform to what society thinks we should drink, and then we eventually stop giving a shit altogether.  You can find out a lot about a person based on their drinking preferences, folks.

Screwdriver (Age Range: Probably way too young: Senior year of high school/freshman year of college)

     

What you’re thinking: Beer? Fuck beer. Shit’s gross and you can’t even conceive buying it at this stage in your life. You’re young, you have the house to yourself one weekend, one of your friends took the vodka from their parents’ liquor cabinet and said that they definitely won’t notice that it’s gone.  Coincidentally, you have some Tropicana.  Life’s pretty awesome.

Reality: You live off of these for an embarrassing amount of time until you realize that life’s too short to gag every time you drink orange juice.

Aggressively Cheap Light Beers (Age Range: The entirety of college)

What you’re thinking: You could give less of a fuck about what beer tastes like, you’re just trying to get drunk. Start lining up your walls with pieces of Keystone, Busch and Natty boxes because you’re more creative than everyone and no one has ever thought of that. The only time you step out of bounds is when someone gets their signing bonus or you’re drinking Guinness on St. Patrick’s Day.

Reality: Beer is a means to an end. It’s your social crutch because “everyone’s doing it” and all the girls want to play flip cup.  Set up a long wooden table and they will come.

Bud/Coors/Miller Lite (Age Range: End of college/first couple of years out of college)

What you’re thinking: You have some money now, but rent, Time Warner/Comcast and your very own cell phone bill are putting a damper on models & bottles. No worries, though. Luckily for you, everyone is in the same exact spot. If they served an aggressively cheap light beer on tap at the bar, you’d order it, but the establishment that you’re in is too respectable.  Just look around, you all have one of these bottled beers in your hand.

Reality: The prospect of real life sucks very badly.  It’s not at all what you were expecting, but if EVERYONE is freaking out, is anyone really freaking out?

Gin and Tonic, Jack and Coke, Red Bull Vodka, Whiskey Ginger (Age Range: Mid-twenties – until you get married)

What you’re thinking: It’s becoming socially unacceptable to drink 23 beers and piss the bed when you get home. It’s time to upgrade to the hard stuff so people respect you a little more. They’re a little bit more expensive, but you have a little bit more money now. You’re also in that beautiful life window where you have very few weekend responsibilities, so the blistering hangovers that you get allow you to catch up on Netflix, your DVR and regrettably eating leftover Chinese food.

Reality: Depending on how things go, this could be the rest of your life.  Hopefully a chick starts tolerating you and your disgusting antics soon enough.

“Named” Drinks, Straight Alcohol on the Rocks, Craft Beer (Age Range: Late twenties – until you have a kid)

What you’re thinking: You’re fancy as shit.  You moved up at your firm, have a pretty solid grip on life and found a girl that doesn’t hate you yet. Why not order a drink that you don’t entirely understand?  Hell, you’ve watched four seasons of Mad Men, you’re fully capable of ordering a “Manhattan” or a “Scotch on the Rocks.”  Oh, and that beer you just drank is an India Pale Ale, FYI. You’ve earned all of this for the terrible drinking you’ve done up until this point.

Reality: You have no idea where you are, why there’s a jazz band playing or why you “had” to wear a blazer out.  You know there’s no turning back now and you’d literally kill to play beer pong out in the yard with a pinnie on.

Whatever helps the day pass by (Age Range: Once you have a family – the rest of your life)

What you’re thinking: Now you know why you saw Dad casually down a bottle of red wine the last time you were home. Your wife has a liquor cabinet, but you can’t drink out of it because you’re “aging” the alcohol. You just stepped on a Ninja Turtle action figure because of your stupid, ill-behaved son. And finally, as soon as you go on the computer, you see a $400 dollar charge from your daughter’s emergency credit card at 4 a.m. and you don’t even want to know what happened. You did it. This is the American Dream.

Reality: You don’t want to live a day past 75.

Obviously everyone is different, so some of this won’t apply to you. For the most part, this is what you’re doing, what you’re going to do or what you have already done.  Welcome to the rest of your life, Bros.

Follow Dub J on Twitter and check his blog, A Working Man’s Diary