Scotch--the drink of angst. No getting around it. It's hard to be angsty over a bloody Mary--unless it's really blood and her name was Mary.

If it's a noir Western you could probably get away with tequila, but even then your tortured hero is likely to be hunched over a bottle of whiskey. Vodka and schnapps would work well in some old, grey city filled with existential woe. Boilermakers involve whiskey, don't they? If he was lurking around the office, a boilermaker might work.

But when you're dealing out the real, low-down, end-of-your-rope angst, the poetic drink is whiskey.

edit: the only ones who do angst well with wine is some smelly, grey-haired guy in a tattered coat, huddled in some boxes in an alley, and it turns out he used to be a succesful surgeon or brilliant musician, until That Day. And then he's most likely swilling down Thunderbird or Mad Dog 20/20.

If it's a noir Western you could probably get away with tequila, but even then your tortured hero is likely to be hunched over a bottle of whiskey. Vodka and schnapps would work well in some old, grey city filled with existential woe. Boilermakers involve whiskey, don't they? If he was lurking around the office, a boilermaker might work.

Boilermakers are whisky in beer. I like doing Canadian Club and Molson. Boilermakers were what Wesley was consuming in Tomorrow.

Scotch isn't really an angsty drink. I mean, it can be, but it's more Old Boy and Club Chair than that. When mentioned in stories, it's almost never rotgut J&B, which is somewhat angsty.

Vodka, of course, is a classic drink of Pain and Angst. And stuff.

I'd like to see more gin. I can see Wes swilling gin.

Gin would work. He is British. He could do Peter O'Toole impressions.

It would also be more supported by the evidence we see in canon than scotch. IJS.

And it would be less... common.

See, with Giles, we know he's a scotch drinker. He's said it; it's what we've seen, it's good. We've seen Wesley drink a fair amount, yet we've not seen him with a glass of scotch kicking back. Yet everyone and her dog seems to write him as a scotch fiend.

Which is just projecting.

Hey, I'm a projector! Cool. Super 8 or 35 mm or Cinemascope? I hope I've got Dolby sound.

The joke is, gin-wise, that until some point in this century gin was rotgut; now it's considered sort of snobby. I suppose it's because nobody drinks raw gin now; they drink it with mixers, and that way lies snobbification and the dreaded label "girly drink".

I suspect fanon settled on whisky/scotch because of the major hard liquors, vodka has no flavor, and rum and gin are almost sweet. I can drink any of them neat, and I'm no hardened drinker; but scotch neat makes me splutter.

A man who can drink scotch neat without a splutter is a man who knows what he's doing, hard-liquor-wise. Which is to say neither that scotch drinkers are alkies nor that beer drinkers aren't, but I get why the stereotype arises.

The joke is, gin-wise, that until some point in this century gin was rotgut; now it's considered sort of snobby. I suppose it's because nobody drinks raw gin now; they drink it with mixers, and that way lies snobbification and the dreaded label "girly drink".

I used to drink raw gin. I've used it before precisely because of the history of the stuff. Blue Ruin/Mother's Ruin here we come! Though most people I know who drink it mostly straight are drinking martinis.

Whisky *in general* I can get behind. Irish, Canadian, Jack. The ones that work well in mixes or chased with beer and aren't specifically the chosen drink of another character. Hell, of three other characters: Giles, Doyle, and Whistler. Four, if you count Lilah. I tend to think more that fanon has just gone ahead and assumed it through confusion and through one or two good stories than anything else.

At the tale-end of Season 3, we have plenty of evidence to suggest that Wes's drinking more than he should, but as he's only a year removed from drinking random silly girly drinks in an effort to get thoroughly pissed, and as he's out of a job, seeing him getting plastered on Laphroaig takes me out of the story to a small degree. Plus it makes me cry for the Laphroaig, which should never be abused like that.

And yes, I've thought about this too much.

I've gotten plastered on Laphroaig! It's a good plastering.

Isn't he drinking whiskey shots with his beer in "Tomorrow"?

I've gotten plastered on Laphroaig! It's a good plastering.

t sheepish so have I, generally slowly, and with sipping. And by expanding my definition of "double" to mean Extra Huge Glass of Twice. Which is what I did two nights ago. Still, I'm not shooting it.

Isn't he drinking whiskey shots with his beer in "Tomorrow"?

He is indeed consuming the Boilermaker, from the looks of it at a rate of slightly more than a shot per pint.

Edit: Specifically, he's pouring the shots into the beer before drinking them, rather than doing a shot with a chaser.

I could see Wes doing vodka, but that's because my veddy, veddy British and professorial stepgrandfather loves good vodka.

At Thanksgiving, my dad, SGF, and I have shots of Chopin or Gray Goose (which Dad keeps hidden in the freezer), while a jug of Popov sits out for general consumption.

Question re. boilermakers (I actually need to know this for a fic). Does a boilermaker always involve dumping the shot into the beer, or can one alternate? I'd also imagine that a boilermaker hangover is pretty nasty stuff.