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Mike: Are you YouTube's Wheezy Waiter?

Craig: I am, I belong to YouTube and I am Wheezy Waiter.

Mike: Uh huh.

Craig: I drink coffee. I have a beard. I punch eagles sometimes.

Emma: And you also drink alcohol, which is why we have invited you here today.

Craig: I do, I had a catch phrase on my channel for a while: "Get Drunk!" That was a catch phrase. I kind of stopped doing it in my videos 'cause as the audience grew, it also grew younger, and you don't always want to encourage that kind of thing.

Emma: Okay, well yeah. Today we're going to talk about some tips for drinking - parentheses - responsibly.

Craig: Responsibly and of age. If you're in the United States, you wait until you're 21, young man or woman. A lot of other countries, 18. You can still wait until you're 21, or not at all. You don't have to drink at all.

Emma: That's true, that's an option which is why we've asked Craig here today, because neither Mike nor I drink.

Mike: Do you want to, like, do some kind of intro about -- 

Craig: About booze?

Mike: Yes.

Emma: A long history. Please give the history of booze for us.

Craig: All right, here's what we're dealing with. Wine, beer, or hard alcohol.
So with beer, lately especially, we are in the middle of a renaissance here in the United States for beer.

Mike: So I hear.

Craig: Lots of microbrews cropping up, lots of different types of beer. But the main ones I would say are like a lager or pilsner. More like Bud or Miller, like traditional American beers for many years, which are lighter, crisper, more refreshing some would say. Some would say they're just bland, I guess.

Pale Ales or IPAs, which are bitter, hoppy beers. They have a unique bitter flavor to them.

You've got wheat beers, or hefeweizens, they have a unique wheaty flavor to them. Tend to be my favorite.

Dark beers, you've got stout, porter. Sometimes they taste like desserts, chocolate. So that's beer.

Wine! There's like, many, many different varietals, they're called varietals.

Cabernet, Merlot, Pinot Noir - for red, for red wine. I'm not really that much of a wine expert, but I know a little.

And then you've got white wines, you've got Chardonnay, Pinot Grigio -- 

Emma: And others!

All: And others!

Craig: Then you've got your hard alcohols. Main ones would be whiskey, rum, tequila -- whiskey would be my favorite.
I don't like vodka. Good vodka's all right, but to me vodka's just something people drink to get drunk. They just drink it to hide the alcohol, they put it in things -- sweet things, so they don't taste it.

Mike: Like orange juice and things like that?

Craig: Yeah, yeah. I would say embrace the flavor. Whiskey has really good flavor. Scotch, it's like whiskey but it's made in Scotland.

Mike: Is it true that they call it hard liquor because then you can punch people harder?

Craig: That is not true. That is -- I don't think I've ever heard that before. Or did you just make that up?

Emma: Now what about, there's those things that rhyme about what order you should drink things in?

Craig: Whiskey before beer, you're in the clear. Beer before liquor, never sicker. But it's not -- I don't think it's true. It might be true situationally, because if you have beer and you get kinda drunk, and then you go to hard alcohol, you're going to consume the hard alcohol the same rate you were consuming the beer, then you're in big trouble. I don't think there's anything as far as the ingredients of the drinks. I think it's all just the amount of alcohol.

Mike: If I'm just like, out on the town, and I just started taking a new medication, should I just like start pounding them down without checking?

Craig: Totally not.

Mike: Okay! Let me ask you something. You were talking about amount of alcohol. Have you had any experiences with that, like mixing drinks to ill effect?

Craig: I've had bad experiences with alcohol. I've never attributed it to the types of alcohol. I always assume that it's just the amount of alcohol, the amount consumed.

Mike: Like, okay, so what happened with my history with alcohol is that when I was like 3 my dad was drinking red wine. I thought it was Cherry 7 Up. Like, I sipped it and I was just like "Blah." So I tasted it, I just never like ingested it.

Craig: If you want to enjoy drinks, I would say it's very likely you're not going to like a lot of drinks the first time you try them.

Mike: Yeah.

Craig: Better attitude to have would be to go into it enjoying the flavor, not so much -- trying to just get drunk. My fiance and I go out to eat, we have -- we drink for flavor, we try cocktails that people are making. It's like, it's an art form, and we try to really appreciate it. I think you need to find the one really good one, and you get a flavor for it, and you can start to pick out those flavors in other wines that you drink.

The thing I like most about consuming beverages is not the buzz. Maybe when I was younger I liked that, or the getting drunk. Now it's the unique flavors that you can only get from these drinks. And the buzz is nice, but it's just a bonus. Like, I would prefer to drink a great wine than, like, five Miller Lites or something.

Mike: Yeah.

Craig: Quality over quantity.

Mike: Drinking on empty stomach, any thoughts on this?

Craig: You'll feel maybe a little more buzzed, a little drunker if you don't have food in you. I don't know if that's true, if that's proven, but to me it seems like it. Probably more unhealthy because you have less nutrients in your body, because you just have the alcohol.

Mike: Can you talk a little bit about pacing yourself?

Craig: Doctors are saying these days that a drink or two an evening can actually be good for you. Once you get up to four or five or so, then it's not good for you anymore.

To pace yourself, I mean I'm not going to say don't go out and get drunk, Cause some of you will. Just be aware.

Maybe drink water in between drinks. That's a good method that I've used. Just try to keep the number in your head of how many you've had. You could easily lose track.

Um, maybe pay attention to how much people around you are drinking. If you're drinking faster than them, you should probably slow it down.

And don't drive! Don't drive! [slowly and with emphasis: DON'T DRIVE] Don't drive if you're going to have more than a drink or two. You might feel like you can drive, don't fall into that trap, thinking, "Ah I got this, this is no problem."

Mike: One thing that we've kind of thought about is you have to know how you're getting home.

Craig: I mean now we have Uber, if you live in a place that has Uber. In Chicago we have the train, and if you do drink too much, call somebody. How do you feel about drinking?

Emma: Okay. For other people. I think it's a personal choice and I think sometimes people, when you say you don't drink, people think that you're going to sit there and judge them for drinking, which is not the case.

Craig: Drink or don't, it's your choice. But if you do, do it responsibly.

Mike: I've heard, like, "Oh, he's an angry drunk, he's a sad drunk," or whatever.

Emma: Yeah. Is that a thing?

Mike: Is that a thing?

Craig: I think it is a thing. Sometimes it changes, like I think I've probably been all of them at one point. Sometimes it's like the mood that you were in before you started drinking could be accentuated.

Often people get very honest when they drink. There are sad drunks, people who will just every time just get sad or depressed. Or people will get angry, that happens.

Emma: So what would you say constitutes "a drink" if you're having a drink.

Craig: Just "a drink?"

Emma: Like quantity-wise.

Craig: Well, I do know that about five ounces of wine is like, a drink. Twelve ounces of beer would be a drink. An ounce and a half of hard alcohol, 80 proof hard alcohol, would be a drink.

Emma: I think we just learned a great deal.

Craig: And that is all we've got for you today.

Mike: If you guys have any tips about drinking responsibly, please let us know in the comments section below, we would love to hear from you.

Emma: In the mean time, thank you Craig for being here with us today. And uh, any thoughts on a catch phrase?

Craig: A catch phrase? "Get Adult!" How's that?

Mike: Nailed it.

Emma: There could be something there. I like it.

Craig: Get drunk! Or don't. Or just drink moderately.

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