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The contents of these bottles. As finances improved they were replaced with Cambras then Médoc and now cru bourgeois Médoc, though we buy a Cahors now and then when we are feeling nostalgic.
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UPDATED: MAY 18, 2012 Can from Arden Wines- now brewed at 7.4% and distributed by InBev UK. Looks like I’m the first rater to have stumbled on this filth for EIGHT years. Jesus, I’m desperate tonight. Gold with a fat white head falling to a slick. Aroma of rotting apples, grass cuttings, a sprinkle of acetone. Tastes EXACTLY like flying saucers, apple Chewits and sherbet-sprinkled paper. Which is a relief. Tempted to drink, but won’t be doing so.
Perhaps the best beer review ever!
Aaaaaah....... white and frightening
Baileys and tomato juice!
I used to be able to open my throat and just pour stuff into my stomach. This coupled with a sense of adventure and long boarding school weekends led to some dark dark times.
Pouring a litre of warm cinzano into myself whilst staying on a steeply sloped campsite was a low point. Very lucky not to have ended up in the sea.
*thinking back. It was a Louise that saved me that night,
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In most pubs in my home town your choice of draught ale was this or Tetleys. Things have changed thankfully!
I tried thunderbird for the first and last time during my first year of uni.
Managed to fall asleep without the spinning room of doom feeling. Woke up, went for a pee in the toilet cubicle down the hall (no en-suites in our halls of residence), sat down, promptly vomited everywhere. Cleaned myself up in the shower and staggered back to bed. Cowered in my room the next morning when I heard the cleaners arrive.
We once had a night round all the pubs in York that served this:
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No idea why. Horrible stuff; tastes like treacle. The only way to avoid prolonging the agony was to neck it. I vaguely remember things getting a bit messy...
Most local pubs when I was a teenager served Watneys Red Barrel which was really shit , although as a 16 year old I knew no better . Then there was Starlight which was so weak and gassy it was impossible to drink enough to get pissed or you would have exploded .if you were going to a party you could get either a party 4 or a party 7 which were large cans containing either 4 or 7 pints of the same crap .
All the usual suspects already mentioned - Thunderbird (thanks to the influence of the Dogs d'Amour), 20/20, various cheap strong lagers, etc.
Went through a neat vodka phase. Never ended well, those nights (especially when I discovered Smirnoff blue).
Worst thing I imbibed in my youth was shampoo. In my defence it was force fed to me while I was heavily under the influence already. Not sure the mate whose house we were in has ever forgiven me for the resulting blue, frothy projectile vomit that covered his parents' lounge...
Clearly, we were both far too classy to drink Buckfast.
I tasted it once, howling stuff.
White Lightning was for posh lads.
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Homebrew, at teenager parties. Past caring and you're having to sieve the yeast between your teeth. Eeeugh. Usually following a couple of quart bottles of Strongbow.
Portland Sunset, named after the pub wall we drank it on. Stolen bottle of Pernod mixed with a cheap bottle of Bucks Fizz in a pint glass.
Ended bad.
Uni was all about the purple nasty, VK's and reefs, and every wednesday night was midnight madness, everything £1 from 11.30 to 12.30 so used to get multiple red, blue and green aftershock in one glass, thought of it makes me queezy now
Southern comfort. Will never drink it again after 'that night'.
Diamond white. Me and my mates worked in a bar, where one night we were drinking on a night off. It was busy so instead of queuing we go a crate of diamond white. Each. Eventually we decided not to bother queuing for the gents either when there were all these empty pint glasses around the place. At closing the bar manager came to get the now warm dead glasses. He fired us so the spot as he picked up 2 in 1 hand by dipping his fingers into the warm piss. I'll never forget his look of disgust tinged with betrayal and incomprehension.
Special brew. Seriously. What was I thinking. I could never look her in the eye again after that, and she was a really nice girl.
18 yrs old. Student flat.
One evening, I dined on these [img] 
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Whilst washing it down with this
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Then went down the student bar and polished off 4/5ths of one of these (in a brown paper bag) [img] 
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2hrs start to finish.
Kebab on the way home. Decorated the walls of several rooms with alien vomit. Passed out. Hangover from hell. Mate rocked up and scrubbed everything clean. Top lad. Went to another mate's house and spewed pink liquid. Felt normal around 8pm. Went down the student bar.
Happy - and classy - days. Not sure how I survived some of them.
Just remembered another of my uni days. A well known 'nightclub', a veritable palace of dreams, was free entry before 0930 (I think), so we'd plan our approach with precision.
The first step involved a bottle of Quagga. The cheapest red wine we could find. Whole bottle, in a big stein. I forget the exact timings, but everyone opened their bottle at entry-x minutes, and it was necked to meet the time we had to leave to walk down to the Palace of Dreams....
X minutes wasn't many minutes. There was much shouting of soup.
Purple Nasty as shown under "vom vom vom " on page 1. Snakebite & black for the uninitiated
^used to do similiar before walking to the club, I used to go for a warm bottle of cheap supermarket own brand whitwine and my mate would do half a bottle of Port. Every week like clockwork. Grim
Oh yes, a bottle of cheap wine, and a pint glass please barman. Plastic glass? That'll do nicely.
This sounds absolutely lethal.
It was indeed, we also used to occasionally strawpedo bottles of wine, that would seriously f*ck you up.
Oh, and the time I discovered that teachers whiskey tastes ok neat if you chase it with beer, did a half bottle in 30 minutes, then went to the pub. Woke up in the recovery position with no recollection of the evening... tunred out I came home hammered, was chatting with my housemate and passed out during the conversation (literally collapsed mid-sentence), he stuck me in the recovery position just in case I vommed and went to bed.
I'd forgotten all about Inch's. Great to be reminded.
It was such a staple tipple that the corner shop used to sell out early in the evening, forcing us onto the more esoteric shelves. I really can't remember the names of some of the shite we used to neck before heading out.
Generally it would be brightly coloured, way too sweet, but always in excess of 20% ABV. The critical criterion.
At the start of term, when funds were rather more 'available', used to treat myself to the half litre bottle of Spar own brand whisky. It had a hip flask shaped bottle. Despite a few bad nights, I still drink whisky (perhaps an indication of how bad the Spar stuff was).
Once on the town, we used to devour Lamont Pils. £1 a bottle at 6%.
For the after party, anything to impress the ladies. Archers, Bacardi, Malibu (or the corner shop equivalent which was sun tan oil and acetone I think).
Happy days.
Although, not proud to admit that more than a few finished up in A&E. Needless pressure on an overstretched service. Including one night when there was a BBC documentary crew filming about the needless pressure on an overstretched service...
Now I go mountain biking instead.
Once drank some meths on a camping trip!
Also another time drank an entire crate of Bacardi breezers then a bottle of red wine. Urgh.....
Now I go mountain biking instead.
We used that to recover from the hangovers so we could carry on that night, puke in the bushes on the first climb and you were golden for the rest of the ride/day/night out.
I miss being young and invincible.
Merrydown Cider nights at Uni.
The precursor to the land of the walking dead.
For some reason, I decided I was a Castlemaine XXXX man when I was about 15. Probably because it was the only thing I'd ever drunk and therefore had to be my favourite. For years that was all I drank, that and jamesons whisky. Still like the jamesons but no more aussie urine for me please.
At uni I drank a lot of snapping turtles- £1 a drink on a sunday night in the union and I was in there every sunday. Orange juice, peach schnapps, blue curacao, vodka, all topped off with fat cream which instantly curdles into blobs and floats around the drink like a lava lamp. (and honestly, you'd probably be safer drinking a lava lamp). Actually I could go for a few of those right now.
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Snakey B/diesel, obviously.
20/20 equally obviosuly.
Then we started mixing...
Turbo diesel - cider, lager, black current, double vodka. Filth.
Turbo spritzer - white wine, Smirnoff ice, shot of Malibu. Rank.
Those were the days.
20/20 - football coach trips
TNT - football coach trips
BREAKER - up the woods
Grolsch - around the streets
Molson - around the streets
Red Stripe - up the woods
Kronenberg - anywhere
Leffe 9 per cent stuff, two small bottles and hammered! in the pub.
Scrumpy - on holiday in Somerset
Superbock - holiday abroad
Amstel - holiday abroad
My brother and I distilled our own. It enabled us to give awesome parties where all the good looking girls wanting hot sex right away turned up.
Or so we told.
Should never have drunk the stuff ourselves. It was mainly genuine firewater with the occasional drop of genius.
The one good thing about it was that's how I met my wife.
Northwind - Member
For some reason, I decided I was a Castlemaine XXXX man when I was about 15...
You know why they call it XXXX?
Because Queenslanders can't spell beer...
I must have been the only one.....
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As a young teenager I started on Diamond White, Kestrel Super, Tennents Super, Mad Dog etc... much like many of the previous correspondents.
Sundays after playing football used to revolve around numerous pints of Red Stripe or Kronenbourg in the local at lunch. Followed by a trip to town for something to eat, a trip to the Saracens Head for more Red Stripe, followed by bottles of Jammin or Metz alcopops when too many beers had been drunk. We'd then end up in Chaplins which had the stickiest floor in the world. It was tough to get up for school the next morning.
At uni I decided that lager gave me spots so moved to bitter (Stones) or those weird Irish beers Wexford, Caffreys, Harp Irish or Beamish Red. This would usually be followed by fuel injected turbo shandies (extra vodka shots), and TVRs (tequila, vodka and red bull). Nights generally finished up with After Shocks. By the time I was coming towards graduation turbo shandies were being replaced by cheeky vimto.
A shot of this...
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Mixed with a shot of
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Topped up with a shot of
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And finished with a shot of
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Then necked in one, x about 15.
A word of warning though, it turns into a brown sludge which, when combined with what you ate for tea (in my case , spaghetti hoops on toast) does not clean up easily once thrown up onto the cream carpet of the girl that had brought me home, and kicked out, before getting kicked out of 2 taxis and totally not remembering wandering the streets of Derby for 4 hours before sobering up enough to work out where I was and to phone a taxi.
Then have a hangover for 3 days. Didn't drink for a month after, even when working in a busy city centre bar.
Never saw that girl again...
Just looked up black bottle, seems it got a relaunch a few years ago and is a bit more respectable that the shite it was in my teens.
NO- the old black bottle was a well regarded blend up here, after the change it became the only bottle of whisky neither I or the wife could finish, we actually poured it down the sink.
When I was in my [i]drinking[/i] days I used to go to the local cornershop where they would fill a bottle you took yourself with sherry from a plastic barrel, for 70p.
Havent seen Lambrini mentioned yet. Think it was £3.75 for 1.5l at uni so a bottle of that and a fiver for £1 pints/doubles down the union saw me right for a night. As in, unable to walk, talk or remember anything.
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If there's one thing a big family birthday party needs, it's a hallucinogenic mind enema endorsed by a bloke who removed his own ear after drinking it.
Worthington 'E', Watney's Red Barrel, Bell's and Teachers Scotch, that's about it, really, and that was late in my teens, because I didn't have a bunch of mates to go getting drunk with, I went to the pub on my own, mostly, and that stuff was what was advertised on telly.
Once I got friendly with a small bunch, one of whom lived at a pub in town, then learning what was decent beer and scotch began in earnest...
Whilst at college, I was on a pretty much guaranteed promise with a university girl, until a chance discovery of Ouzo towards the end of the night out left me comatose.
Much smiling at all of this - nostalgia? No.
Pernod; orange curacao; triple sec - no no no.
A couple of really bad experiences on spirits - at 18 out with school mates & drank neat whisky all night culminating in trebles with total intake in excess of a bottle; lucky not to finish up in hospital after that one.
The other was a new year's eve - after a night of beer and wine moved onto neat dark rum; found it easier to crawl than walk after that session. I also swallowed the smallest from a set of russian dolls which was....embarrassing - and it was never recovered.
Both sessions involved involuntarily decorating the pavement.
I haven't tasted or smelled dark rum since then and it took me years to develop an appreciation of malt which I then drank rarely and in moderation.
Happy days???
Complete lightweight now.
Just to add - poteen from Connemara but it was much more enjoyable throwing it onto an open fire than it was to drink; it has similar flammability to petrol.
i did the dentist chair thing that Gazza made famous a few years later. Neat spirits poured down your throat etc.
I remember zig zag walking back up the road and completely missing the hotel, only to be awoken by a woman off a coach who saw i was okay after i'd fell asleep/unconscious? at the side of the road.
They gave me a lift back which was nice, only to find my mate asleep in a wardrobe!
Red label Thunderbird got me through uni..... God knows why as it was disgusting. Still remember drinking a load of it, then accidentally necked some bong water and promptly puked over myself. Classy times.....
Nipper99 - Member
I must have been the only one.....
I wish you were -this post is making me feel slightly nauseous
I definitely enjoyed one too many dubious drinks in my youth. Merrydown, thunderbird, Gold label,southern comfort, pernod, MD2020 and the odd pint of bitter as I grew up in a village full of farmers so downing pints was game we frequently played.
So glad my way ward youth ended fairly abruptly when I fell pregnant . . .(the two may have been connected)
I dread to think where I would have ended up!
Gin with Lemon Hooch as a mixer - blimey, that ended badly
Yep, triple gin and hooch (or Two Dogs a couple of years before, I may be older than you)
Also
Blastaway a bottle of Diamond White and a bottle of Castaway mixed in a pint glass. Tasted like lilt.
Very very dangerous but not nearly as nasty for me as a pint of Stella. The chemistry of that particular lager and me do not mix well at all.
Other things I will probably never drink again as a consequence of youthful enthusiasm...
Archers, Malibu, Southern Comfort, Cinzano, Le Piat D'or, Hock, Liebfraumilch, Bells whiskey.
Same as Klunk with the Cinzano only it was accompanied by a towelling wristband soaked in grease and tar remover which one would inhale after a slug of vermouth.
Classy, eh...
TBH from a 12 year old onwards in my school days I used to make a concoction of all the spirits in my parents cabinet, stick it in my metal camping flask (a litre) and take it with me to help get through the day.
On reflection there were some really obvious signs of something going a bit wrong... 🙂
this post is making me feel slightly nauseous
Me too, I don't consider my self a heavy or a good drinker or even someone who likes drinking more than a couple of pints.
This year I have probably drank about 3-4 pints so far.
But when I hit Uni in 1998 drinking was just so all encompassing. Looking back I drunk soo much even though as lightweight I was clearly drinking a lot LOT less than other students.
For the first 6 weeks I drunk at least 3 pints everyday. I remember being desperate to go home just to have a rest.
I started to get used to it by the second term (10 weeks) and I remembering considering that a quiet night in was going down to the hall bar and playing pool/darts and drinking about 3 pints ish.
Which as I say is about same amount I've drunk all year so far.
Ah, Nipper, I was also a slave to the Gold Label Barley Wine. Couldn't stand Cider aand this was the strongest beer in the off licence that I could get served in.
I think the guy in the offy was so glad to see some going out the door that they never bothered asking for ID.
About 10 years ago I caught my, then 90 year old, Nan drinking the stuff at her home. She used to put in the Christmas puddings but would always buy too much.
Hard as nails my Nan was, even though she was under 5 feet tall.
A few stick in the mind. mainly from Uni, to be fair.
There was Pitman's pint - on sat am we'd get the newspaper and pick half a dozen lower league football games that Rob Pitman and a.n.other would assess using their 'skills'. I think you got a point for a correct result and 3 for a correct score, whoever got the most won and whoever lost did Pitman's pint. Which would contain all sorts; slops, donations, few shots, almost always Bailey's to make it curdle, and if left unattended one ginger lad had a habit of pulling out a handful of pubes and adding it as garnish. Usually meant the evening ended early and badly for the winner.
Like others, Sat was for Uni football and then we'd meet for post match analysis, with first pint always being a special brew / 1080 snakebite down in one. Again, consequences predictable.
I have 2 specific nemeses. One was finding that another college's bar promotion was whisky at 3 shots for a quid (mixer extra). 7 quid later and I'm puking my absolute ring, but with only 175ml of content, after the first soapy shout there's nothing much else to come but still the retching continues. I never knew you could pull stomach muscles from the inside but i hurt for days. Took me years to be able to stomach whisky after that.
The other was a teenage drinks cupboard raid at a party, and a bottle of Ricard. Similar results, but even today 30 odd years on, just a taste of Pastis and that saliva gland under my tongue starts to lubricate in preparation. Oddly, it's only the drink, I quite like aniseed / aniseed balls, etc.
Another was Diamond White. Blind date for 3 of us to meet a mate's girlfriend's friends. We had a couple of pints already and stopped at the Uni bar for another before heading to the meeting place.... and they had a 'drink 5 bottles and get a free (really cheap really crap) T-shirt' promo. So 15 mins later with t-shirts on over the top of our best clothes we present at the meeting point, her friends take one look at us and turn tail never to be seen again. Ah well, still good memories.
I suppose the only other one worth mention was my Nan's funeral / wake. Where my uncle and I both got hammered on G&T (her drink) and then streaked around the pub - but as she was a publican most of her life with a wild streak herself i think that was a fitting tribute rather than something to be ashamed of.
I remembering considering that a quiet night in was going down to the hall bar and playing pool/darts and drinking about 3 pints ish.
So true. In an attempt to curb drinking the college bar only used to open from 2030 to 2230 on weeknights and sundays (1830-1930 and then 2030-2230 on Saturdays)
All that happened was we got used to drinking fast. It was not uncommon to do 8 pints on a weeknight in 2 hours. Looking back i also don't know how we survived (either that or the beer was heavily watered down)
I think this was a 1980s NE thing.
"A blend of British wine and Scottish Whiskey".
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I used to work on the fags & spirits counter of a low-budget supermarket in Tottenham as a part-time job at Uni.
Clan Dew was very popular with the regulars. It was about 30% if memory serves?
Unless that was you popping in to stock up Gobulchul?
I worked in a nightclub that for its thursday night promo did black death vodka for 50p a shot and black death tequila for 20p. So it was completely normal for people to order a pint of tequila and 2 shot glasses, for £4.50. The vodka was rank and the tequila was paintstripper but when your goal for the evening is to catch an STD that's all fine
I’ll cop to have drank Buckfast.
It’s truly murderous stuff, and not just in the sense that it’s facilitated more than a few murders.
You’ve got to hand it to those monks for having the idea of combining copious amounts of alcohol, caffeine and sugar before it became fashionable.
Every bottle was a self-contained adventure. Our preferred mode of consumption was to serve it chilled (achieved by immersing it in the river Clyde for a couple of hours), thus leaving it marginally less cloying.
However, it also served as a versatile cocktail ingredient. We often mixed it with lager to create “Bugger”. A sub-variant of this was created by using an exceedingly cheap lager, purchased for about 5p per can from Gateway, called Breaker (someone’s posted a picture above). The resultant drink was known as “Breakfast”.
The first time I drank it was at a horribly ill-advised party thrown by a girl in the year below me at school. Newly built house, parents away for the evening, wall to wall cream carpets, bit of a rainy evening, circa 50 drunk teenagers. House got utterly destroyed. I decided to get the hell out of Dodge when the girl’s uncle (a renowned local bampot) turned up to turf everyone out. However, as I was leaving via the front door, I came face to face with a big white balloon hanging at head height.
And what do you do when you come face to face with a big white balloon hanging at head height? Well, you headbutt it don’t you?
It was a glass porch light.
Ah Absinth. That brings back a memory or rather not. I was on tour at the time and went down with a severe virus/flu type symptoms. I was shivering and feeling generally near death before the show. One of the band decided that the only thing for me was to drink half a bottle of the stuff. Apparently I was flying on stage (I have absolutely no recognition of the evening) but when I woke up the next day I felt bright as a button. I'm pretty sure that stuff nuked all the germs in my body!
I can't even look at Cinzano without wanting to retch. It was the first drink I was so drunk and puked on as a teenager. 😡
Student Promo nights used to kill me, there's a few things I can't stand even now.
Huddersfield Poly Union, the old building in the middle of site, used to do some cracking specials about 88/89.
50p a double for Southern Comfort - can't drink it nearly 30 years later, Tuborg Gold made my hurl after a can and half - like Special Brew but worse. Dodgiest one was some cheap barrels of Belhaven Bitter they got, tasted foul going down and coming back.
Have fond memories of skipping an afternoon of lectures to spend hardly anything on a two day hangover.
Turbo diesels. Pint glass with a bottle of K and a bottle of Becks. Occasionally with black.
It was actually quite nice, if what little memory I have of it serves.
Edit:
Then we started mixing...
Turbo diesel - cider, lager, black current, double vodka. Filth.
Turbo spritzer - white wine, Smirnoff ice, shot of Malibu. Rank.
Seems we missed out on the vodka.
Hmmm Litre bottle of Blue Smirnoff and Irn Bru wasn't going to end well.
Cue a late night Edinburgh Glasgow train being redecorated with scotch broth and emergency stop handles being pulled.
How we weren't carted off by the BTP I'll never know.
The night on Orkney Skullsplitter (8.5%) didn't end well for me either...
Nothing too silly now, although I had several cans of Sixpoint Resin (9.1%) a couple of weeks ago to round off an evening in spoons, kinda buggered up most of the next day, much to my OH's annoyance.
Gone are the days of a bit of a hangover until mid morning, nowadays its a day and a half.