> But it's the fun of alcohol!

For a while it is. But sometimes you don’t want to keep being drunk.

Maybe you want to drive home, or your childcare ends, or you just have other things to do that day.

If I could just end the whole thing at will, including the hangovers you mention, that would be ideal.

I'd love to take one of these when I'm going home. There's no use to keep absorving alcohol when I want to go to sleep.

I find marijuana to be the fun of alcohol without the impacts you mention.

Eh, maybe for some. Alcohol has anti-anxiety effects and "loosens" me up. Cannabis has a pretty good track record of making me anxious, even in small amounts. And while it can make me feel comfortable just chilling out, it's not the same sort of mental relaxation and it doesn't work as a social lubricant.

(All of this is obviously just for me. Well aware that different things affect different people...differently.)

Hangovers are a good part caused by by the body reacting to the "damage" that alcohol does:

  - Alcohol loosens the blood vessels, whereas a lot of the effects of a hangover are caused by the body then "over-constricting" when the aclohol goes away, causing headaches and nausea.  The cause of the headache is similar for a brain-freeze from too much ice cream causing the veins in your neck and throat to constrict, though the brain-freeze goes away as you warm back up.
  - There's also the dehydration as alcohol throws off the balance of water in your system as it makes you want to pee more, but interferes with the body's ability to actually absorb water.
  - Alcohol causes your body to pump out more "feel good" hormones, which then lead to a crash later.

So the way to prevent a hangover is to not get drunk in the first place, same as always. If you want to drink and limit the effects of alcohol (including the initial "benefits") then this has potential. It may prevent vomiting in the sense that vomiting is your body trying to eject the poison as it's building up faster than it can process it (eg when you're already trashed an on the train to hangoverville).

However, people often tend to drink for the "good" effects that this gel prevents. If what you want is alcohol's fun, then you're going to need another cure (essentially an IV drip, and drugs to replace the hormones and loosen your blood vessels - all of which are not readily available for other good reasons).

A reliable way to prevent hangovers in my experience is to simply pace yourself properly as well as eat and drink plenty of water.

People go out partying on near-empty stomachs and take crazy amounts of alcoholic drinks with not so much as a drop of water all night; it's no surprise that their bodies react that extremely.

Also, sticking to drinks with low levels of congeners helps immensely. Ethanol is already toxic enough without throwing other more dangerous alcohols into the mix.

I wonder if there's scientific consensus on how much water is "plenty". Like, what's the ABV I should target, averaged over every type of liquid I drank that night?

Regular beer contains about 20x as much water as it does ethanol (by volume), but apparently that's not enough. It's certainly better than wine, though, which only contains 6-8x the water and an entire catalogue of congeners.

Unless it is a strong beer with 2 digits of alcohol per volume, I rarely get drunk enough on beers alone because of all I need to pee to get to that point.

IDK, I personally do something like a 0.5 to 1L of water just before lying down. Takes a little bit of forcing myself, as it's way past satiating immediate thirst or dryness in mouth, but I do it as a calculated measure. It pretty much eliminated headaches for me. I'd still feel like shit the next day - sleepy, groggy, unmotivated - but at least my head wouldn't be ringing.

The issue isn't necessarily water ingestion, but that alcohol messes with the body's ability to absorb it to where it's needed. If you're consuming high amounts of alcohol and water, and enough alcohol nonetheless builds up, the ability to absorb water goes down. It's one reason why you pee more when drinking.

I could see drinking water, then sobering up, and going to sleep could mean water could then be absorbed. That may limit the effects of the dehydration and therefore the hangover.

Also your body's overall health and efficiency probably pays a role. In my teens/20s I could get sloshed and wake up with merely a vague discomfort. In my 30s I started to get actual hangovers. In my 40s its now just awful almost no matter what I do.

On the plus side, I'm saving money drinking less in general...

Common rule of thumb I've always heard is one (8oz) glass of water per beer drank. It works well for me although I never have more than 3-4 anyways.

Some of it is down to that.

Some is down to the metabolic products of ethanol, specifically aldehydes. There are other alcohols (like tert-Amyl alcohol) that people have used recreationally which don't cause hangovers in the same way.

There are other great reasons not to mess with these substances (tert-Amyl is very long lasting and as little as 30ml might kill you), but they do show that some of the hangover is down to the specifics of ethanol's breakdown in the body.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who just really enjoys the taste of alcohol and would love a way to drink more of it without its effects, both the "positive" and the negative side.

It's genuinely one of my big wishes! I'd pay 5x the normal price for a bottle of whisky that neither has the "good" nor "bad" parts, as if it was water but with the same taste.

I don’t think they do whiskey yet, but ISH Spirits makes some tasty alcohol free products.

https://ishspirits.com/

Unless I'm missing something, that just seems like standard non-alcoholic drinks. Which miss the key flavour ingredient I'm talking about - the alcohol! The way it tingles your mouth, the warmth as it goes down, it completely changes the taste profile. Chemistry is not my strong suit so I have no idea if there's any substitutes that could be used to mimic this but without the health effects (good/bad), but until then, nothing nonalcoholic will taste anything like a spirit.

> maybe once a year

you sure you didn't just lower your tolerance?

Your tolerance naturally changes as you get older and the hangovers last longer.

Its cyclical. The tolerance for hangovers and the recovery period went down (god do I hate it) therefore I drink less, thus I have a lower tolerance for alcohol.

> But it's the fun of alcohol!

Meh, I like wine more and more and being drunk less and less, one is seriously limiting the other :)

I'm the same way with whisky. I might have to imitate the professional tasters: just swirl and spit. Seems like a travesty but less so than letting my collection gather dust indefinitely.

>>What'd be amazing would be something that really works >>against the headaches and/or prevent vomiting.

If you start vomiting then you overdid it. Your body is trying to save you from poisoning. To prevent the headaches just drink lots of water.

I am not looking at being drunk while having beers but haven't found a non-alcoholic beer yet that would be nearly drinkable.

Interesting. My wife and I have been almost exclusively drinking non-alcoholic beers in the past few years, as we discovered they taste almost exactly the same as regular beers of the same brands.

But then again, we're not beer tasters or into craft stuff, so maybe we can't tell.

I have really awful genetics for drinking(I'm 23 and already experience the thing you're describing with taking multiple days to feel good again, and instead of physical symptoms I get crushing depression) so I'd love to just take some of this stuff before a night out to drink the same volume as other people without having to deal with the aftereffects.

Thats interesting. Are you ok for a 1on1 talk about this topic?

just made an account to chime in, I also experience this immense depression after drinking so you're not alone, will probably quit altogether before too long.