Bulmers Pear – Truth revealed! (contains references to poop!)

So over the last while I’ve had a load of people tell me this strange rumour about how a particular product had laxatives in it. Of course, I didn’t believe this for a second, surely there had to be an explanation that didn’t involve some guy in Quality Control sending a batch of this product back saying,

“There isn’t enough laxatives in it, send it back!”

Depending on where you are, you may find that this product is called Magners. Anyway, Bulmers/Magners is well known for their Apple cider. In fact it sponsors a Rugby League, as well as several sports teams, and are particularly well-known for the ad below and making The Kinks popular for about 4 months (since then the song has become known as “The Bulmers Ad” in Ireland). Here’s the video:

So anyway, 12 months or so ago we suddenly find out about this new product, BULMERS PEAR! People where wondering what it would taste like, even though Kopparberg had their own version that was out for an age and a half before-hand.

Now, when this new product came out, a rumour started spreading that Bulmers had put laxatives in the drink to discourage people from binge-drinking. This, to put things in the vernacular, is a load of Bauvine Excrement! I started my investigation by looking up laxatives on Wikipedia, usually I wouldn’t trust Wikipedia as a source, but then again, where better to find information on stuff relating to poop than the internet, where poop jokes reign!

The truth of the matter is that various fruits promote regularity of the bowels. This basically means that all of the poop will flow better if you eat these fruits, examples of these are orange juice and pears (complete list of foods that have a laxative effect). However if you over-indulge on said fruits you will wind pooping at a rate you weren’t exactly expecting. This is due to the fact that when too much regularity inducing foods are consumed, a laxative effect is experienced. Another example of this is mint, mint helps settle your stomach after a big meal, however if you eat too much mint, you’ll be racing for the toilet.

The problem with Bulmers Pear is that it is actually made with real pears. This means that in small quantities, this drink can help you keep your bowels good a regular. However in large quantities, it will cause stomach discomfort and a laxative effect, much like eating too many pears.

So I see you guys there about to ask,

“Well how do you know all of this?” and I shall tell you. I did a little experiment this week, I bought 8 cans of Bulmers Pear and a punnet of pears (contained 8 pears). I used the pears as a reference test, and discovered that after 8 pears I was rushing to the toilet and pooping like it was my one and only means of propulsion to get away from a horde of rampaging zombies (Wow, that was a crude simile). So about 24 hours later, I tried out the Bulmers Pear and got a strikingly similar result however these results only occurred after 5 cans.

Now to take care of all of you idiots who will say,

“But Felix, how many cans of this delicious beverage can I drink before I start redecorating the bathroom?”. The answer is, I don’t know… It all depends on your metabolism and your tolerance to alcohol and other such factors.

So if you wind up drinking Bulmers Pear and discovering that you’re pooping at a faster rate than normal, that is why. It’s because Bulmers took the time to put real fruit in their cider and the side-effect is not down to their product, but rather the natural characteristic of pears. So the next time you hear this rumour, don’t ring the number on the side of the can because now you know…. AND KNOWING IS HALF THE BATTLE!

This product is very much delicious, and is definitely something worth drinking in this warm weather. As always, do try to drink responsibly, you don’t want to wind up sick, injured, arrested or dead, so do obey your local laws regarding the consumption of alcohol. Be sure to check out the home page to see the most recent articles. While you’re at it, be sure to follow me on twitter (Yes, I’ve joined the huddled masses finally).

Anyway, have fun!

Felix

Anti-sobriety Review: Carlsberg

So we’re starting off the new series with a fairly neutral beer. This is the beer with the famous slogan:

“Probably the best lager in the world”

Lets begin:

Cost:

This beer is one of the standard drinks available in any bar in Ireland. As such it has the same price as most other beers. In the pub you can get a pint (500ml approx) for between €4.50 and €6. Now this is in pubs, in off licenses you can get 6 500ml cans (aka tallboys if you’re from America) for between €10 and €12 depending on what offer is on at the time or where you go. All in all the cost for this beer isn’t that surprising at all, it costs the same amount as the majority of the mainstream beers.

Score for Cost: 3 out of 5

It doesn’t cost too much, but it ain’t cheap either, so this beer gets a nice average mark.

Taste:

Now, I’m not sure if years of smoking has ruined my taste-buds, but this honestly didn’t taste too amazing. I will admit, it didn’t taste horrible either, it was a nice middle of the road taste. This meant that I could drink it without feeling the need to scrunch my face up into a ball whenever I take a sip (which has happened on occasion depending on how cheap the beer is). To be honest, the more and more I drank it, the more and more I lost my sense of taste. Is that an effect of the alcohol, or does it genuinely lack any distinguishing taste?

Score for taste 2 out of 5

Why? It’s not un-drinkable, but at the same time it doesn’t present me with a situation where I want to shout out,

“GET ME ANOTHER CARLSBERG! THIS IS AMAZING!”.

Effect:

Here’s the beautiful thing, a friend of mine managed to source a proper police-grade breathiliser. So from now on effect will be judged on how many of a particular product it takes before I’m legally over the limit. It’s a pretty simple system. It’s currently set to measure with a limit of the currently blood alcohol level of 80 mg of alcohol to 100 ml of blood (apparently). That being said, I expected that after 2 beers I’d be over the limit. But now, we had all green lights going. 4 beers went down the hatch and I was still just under the limit. By this point in time, I was tipsy, I couldn’t understand it, why wasn’t I legally drunk? I’ll tell you, time was the factor. Each pint would take me on average between 30 and 40 minutes to drink fully. This meant that I wasn’t so much getting drunk as just having a few beers. This basically means that the only way you’re going to get drunk on Carlsberg is if you’re knocking them back within 5 minutes and refilling as necessary.  Which leads on to side-effects.

Score for Effect: 3 out of 5

Unless you were pouring these down you’re throat like there was a forest fire in your stomach and only beer could extinguish it, then this product isn’t worth wasting your time on. Especially if your goal is to remain as far from sobriety as possible.

Side-effect:

Oh now here’s the kicker. While you look manly and butch drinking beer all night, it comes with a hefty cost. In fact, several. The first is the biggest inconvenience of all. After 1 pint you need to pee. So you go and come back, and before you’re halfway through the next one you’re back in the toilet.  This doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone at all, so I won’t dwell on it. The second side-effect was that it made me irratible, I got tired and sluggish and started acting like a kid just short of a tantrum. This is bad, really bad, because it explains why so many lads start fights on a night out. It’s because what they’re drinking has literally made them be 4 years old again, and when you’re four, you’ll fight with anyone just for fun. The third main side-effect was a sudden onset of cravings for anything made using copius amounts of grease. I went to the local chipshop and ordered all kinds of greasey crap. I ate it like it was my first meal in 20 years and was constantly plagued with the thought that the next morning my stomach was going to suffer. Why do drunk people flock to places of extreme greasiness after a night out? Why does alcohol make us do the exactly what’s required to make a hangover worse?

Score for Side-effect: 1 out of 5

Why 1? Never in my entire drinking days have I understood why I had such a horrible hangover if I drank beer all night. Then last night I had an epiphany, beer makes you want to have a horrible hangover. Beer makes you want to turn your stomach to ribbons, to get a black eye and to wake up face down on the kitchen floor with no trousers on. Carlsberg provided possibly my worst hangover to date.

The Look:

The original intention of this section of the entry was to highlight how drinking a particular product affects your image. Afterall, even those who claim to not judge on first impressions, subconsciously do. The thing I’ve noticed is that beer doesn’t get you noticed until you’ve had too many and start acting the idiot. So I’m not going to be providing a score rating for this section. Now that being said, there are certain advantages to drinking beer, especially in Ireland. Why? Well everything gets served in the same kind of glass. This means that an awful lot of people will ask about what you’re drinking, thus starting off a conversation. Either way, this really didn’t do much to set off people’s radar at all. That being said, there are nights when you just want to go out and have a drink and not get bothered by a load of idiots going,

“What are you doing drinking that?”.

Overall:

It wasn’t the worst tasting drink that I’ve had the pleasure of consuming. I will say that the fact that you’re spending the majority of your time in transit between your seats and the toilet, you get plenty of exercise and that has to be chalked up as a good thing! That being said, there are a number of things you need to remember if you’re going to go on a night of beer. Always try to avoid getting a take-away anything after a night of beer. Whatever it is about beer, for some reason you just want to get battered lard deepfried and served with a side of grease. I don’t see the logic, it doesn’t work, you wind up feeling worse the next day. Overall, I would highly recommend it for those of you who want a quiet night, but for those of you planning on getting slightly polluted, I’d recommend going towards something that won’t make you pee every 30 seconds.

Score for Carlsberg: 2 out of 5

I’m sorry Carlsberg, you may think you’re probably the best lager in the world, but you didn’t set off any alarm bells with me.

Tune in next time for an Anti-sobriety review for: Heineken

Enjoy!

Felix

PS. As always, please read the disclaimer if you’re new to the blog. Leave a comment, and flick through the previous posts to see if there’s something you like. Please be sure to respect your local laws surrounding the consumption of alcohol (legal ages and whatnot), and most importantly, even if you are of age, try to be a little bit responsible (or at least pretend to be responsible)….

Announcement! Anti-sobriety Review

This website shall be taking a completely new direction. Well not really, it’ll still involve various chemicals to make you do what you wouldn’t normally do. So in the case of the stupidly caffeinated drinks, they made you stay awake all night. What’s this new direction? Well I should explain my situation firstly:

I’m back in college again, and with this comes a lot of parties! With parties comes booze… So this blog shall be covering something new:

ALCOHOL! ^_^

These new reviews will be structured much along the same lines as the previous ones but with a slight twist. So here they are:

1) Cost

Like previous occasions, I’ll be telling you of the cost of whatever product I’m consuming that particular night. This will include both the off-license price as well as the price at the bar.

Scores will be between 0 and 5. 0 being it’s so damned expensive that the only way you’re going to afford this is if you mortgage your house, car or yourself in order to get drunk on it. 5 means that it’s such good value that I’m amazed more people don’t drink it.

2) Taste

Now don’t get me wrong here, I’m not going to be acting like a connoiseur and talking about how the drink tastes of strawberry hews, hints of tar with a slight dash of a small man dancing on the side of the moon eating a ham sandwich. On the contrary, this will be covering the respective drinks ability to be consumed. If it tastes good it means that you’ll be able to drink more quickly, if it tastes bad, you’d more than likely not want to go near it. Either way, you’ll see how this goes in further posts.

Scores for this again go from 0 to 5. 0 means that the drink is so unbelievably disgusting that you really shouldn’t go near it unless you’ve got a steel-lined stomach. 5 means that (to quote Coors Light) it goes down easy.

Look

The big question with this is, how does it make you look. What people hardly ever consider is how what you drink often feeds in to how people form an opinion of you. This means that if you spend your time drinking a particular drink, some might see you as a raving douche etc. Anyway, this will be based on how people react to what I’m drinking.

If I give a product 0 for look, it means that you look like a complete twat drinking it. 5 means either one of two possibilities:

1. It’s a drink that people admire you for drinking
2. It’s something that no one notices

Effect

Do I really need to go over this? Basically, how well will it get you drunk? Will it take just one serving or 20 bazillion before you get the actual alcoholic effect of the beverage in question.

Much like Anti-somniac Review, 0 means that it does absolutely nothing and only those with an extremely (laughably) low tollerance will get drunk on this. 5 on the other hand means that you should only drink if you’ve got someone to carry you home nearby.

Side-effect

This will be going along the lines of “What kind of drunk will you be?”. This basically means that if I wind up slightly less sober than usual, I’ll be commenting on how the drink in question affected my mood and whether or not this is a good thing or a bad thing. It could also encompass any weird things like how it affects one’s appetite in comparison to when one is sober.

0 means that the effects were completely negative, that drinking this particular product will cause you to be violent in some way. 5 means that all of the side-effects are positive, meaning that you’ll be a very happy drunk indeed!

Hangover:

This is by far the most important one of all. If you over indulge on the product in question, how will it affect you the next day.

A score of 0 means that drinking this product will result in you suffering so much the next day that it’s not worth drinking unless you’ve got a strange head-ache fettish. 5 means that the next day, you feel grand.

____________________________

Now for the reference material:

• Age: 23
• Height: 5′ 10” (Yes I know I’m short)
• Weight: 11 stone (or 154lbs or 70kg)

For future reference, my opinion (and you can quote me) is that alcohol was invented with the sole purpose of getting you completely drunk. I am completely certain that when wine, beer, vodka etc. was invented, people drank it until they got extremely wobbly if not worse. So in my mind, I savour alcohol by enjoying its effects rather than sitting down commenting on how it was a good year for [crop used to make product] or that it tasted of something that the product itself shouldn’t taste of. If you don’t like it, go to another blog. This is a blog for people who believe alcohol is a chemical designed to get you drunk, not designed to make you a moany little pissant who sits there sipping their drink for 3 hours. Either get drunk or stay on the soft drinks!

Anyway,

These reviews will be based on a night of drinking one particular product for the entire evening and nothing but! The first series of reviews will cover beers. Here’s what’s on the way:

1. Carlsberg
2. Heineken
3. Guinness
4. Erdinger
5. Bavaria
6. Pratsky
7. Dutch Gold (A particular favourite among the Irish)
8. Tuborg
9. Miller
10. Coors Light

Hope you all enjoy these blogs. As always, feel free to comment on all of my blogs, make suggestions as to what direction you think I should go in. Oh and if you’re new here, please read the disclaimer, for no other reason than to know what I’m blogging here.

Anyway, enjoy!

Felix