Useful Notes / National Drinks

Here is a list of drinks commonly associated with certain nationalities and cultures, in Real Life and fiction.

Britain and Ireland

• Tea. "England's national drink," but really popular across the Isles (famously, Ireland actually drinks more tea per head than the UK).
  • Very class-indicator laden. Big, steaming mugs of really strong "Builder's" tea with lots of sugar (probably poured from a grimy metal or old "Brown Betty" teapot) = blue-collar working class; Mug of well-known brand tea, possibly made American style (teabag on a string), possibly some sugar = white-collar or middle class; china cup (held with pinky in; pinky out is a dead giveaway for faux class) of unsweetened Earl Grey poured from a silver pot = upper class.
  • Immigrant groups are often seen consuming their ancestral brews, particularly Asians drinking masala chai with sugar and evaporated milk.
  • Certain tea blends exist to interact with British patterns—for instance, English and Irish breakfast blends are strong, intended to accompany the heavy, fatty, salty Great British/Irish Fry-Up loaded with bacon, eggs, sausages, fried bread, etc, so drinking one with the other suggests a robust ("manly") appetite; the more delicate ones like Earl Grey and Darjeeling contrariwise are served at afternoon tea with similarly delicate foods like cucumber sandwiches or (at the very heaviest) scones with clotted cream and jam, and suggest a delicate ("womanly") sophistication.
• For stronger drinks, a working-class Brit will have ale, England being an ale culture and still holding tightly to the stuff. The traditional way to order it is to say, "[I'll have] a pint, landlord." (Or, if we're establishing him as a regular at this particular pub, it'll be "The usual, Jim — and one for yourself"). It'll still be a pint of bitter, though. He'll never order a particular brand; sometimes this is lampshaded by a request for "a pint of the non-specific".
  • An Irishman or Irishwoman may make the same order, but rather than a pint of bitter, it's typically a pint of stout—almost certainly Guinness.
  • Very good pubs may boast of many different ales on tap, but the regulars nearly always stick to a favourite ("the usual" or a fictitious name).
  • Don't order a cocktail or liqueur in a pub unless you want to be seen as pretentious or a "poof", except at dedicated, more sophisticated clubs or a yuppie bar.
  • Don't drink your beer by half pints if you don't want to be seen as a "poof" (unless you've made it known you're only there for one, are pressed for time, and can't stay for a whole pint).
  • The "a pint of the non-specific" trope was probably established due to the fact that brand names can't be mentioned on The BBC. EastEnders famously has a variety of fake brands behind the bar at the Vic; other BBC series do show real brands but rarely if ever mention them in dialogue. The phrase itself is a Running Gag from Alistair McGowan's sketches parodying Eastenders.
  • "A broon ale" is a common order for the working class Brit when Oop North.
• An upper-class Brit in a lower-class pub will almost invariably ask for a wine list, to which the barman will inevitably reply, "Red or White?" Only after repeating this line in response to a series of increasing "elementary" wines will the barman suggest mixing the red and white to produce... not "blush", but "pink". "Blush" is almost as vulgar as "pink". Well on the way to being a Discredited Trope now that you can find two dozen varieties of Australian or South American wine in any supermarket; if it shows up these days it's probably a parody. That said, a working-class pub really isn't the place to be ordering wine unless you want to be seen as pretentious or a "poof" (or are a woman); someone who really disdains beer but finds themselves in such an establishment should ask for scotch or brandy (possibly with soda, if the concept of drinking spirits neat is also too much).
• In general, a professional or upper-class Brit (if not in the mood for spirits) will have wine. Even if impoverished—then he'll get cheaper wine. Beer is for farmers, proles, and Irishmen. The wine should be French. This has been true since the Middle Ages: the medieval English went positively gaga over a dark rosé called ''clairet'' from Bordeaux, and even after their tastes had shifted to red wine they kept calling their beloved Bordeaux "claret"—and do pronounce the "t" at the end, the word isn't French any longer. Wars with France in the old days led to occasional upper-class grumbling about the availability of French wine, but it did introduce the British to a few of their non-French favourites, particularly sherry; and the old alliance with Portugal gave the English—and later the early Americans—a taste for Madeira and Port.
  • Port in particular proved extremely popular, to the extent that in time English families ended up moving to Portugal and taking control of a large part of the Port industry; to this day many of the most successful brands of Port have British names, for example Cockburn's, Taylor's, Graham's and Sandeman. As with tea, a whole series of rituals have cropped up surrounding the drinking of Port; for instance, the decanter should always be handed around the table from right to left, and should be passed continuously until it is empty (which shouldn't take that long). It is also considered extremely bad form to ask for the decanter directly if another person at the table is "hogging" it; instead, the tradition goes, one should always ask the offending party: "Do you know the Bishop of Norwich?". If the person doesn't take the hint (usually because they haven't heard of the custom) and says "no," you further nudge them by saying, "He's a terribly good chap, but he always forgets to pass the port." The reasons for any of these traditions have been lost to time and in some cases remain the subject of heated debate.
  • If they are in the mood for spirits, an upper crust or professional Briton (as distinguished from the "sophisticates" mentioned below) will generally gravitate toward the brown spirits in the winter and gin-based drinks in the summer. As regards the brown stuff, whisky is the favoured tipple of anyone with a claim on Scottish ancestry and Irish whiskey preferred by people claiming connections to Ireland; those without either may choose between scotch (which is more or less the default), Irish whiskey, or brandy, although rum may appear among those with a connection to the Navy, and North American whisk(e)ys (particularly American bourbon and Canadian rye) are also somewhat acceptable (especially if the family has a connection to the US or Canada). The brown stuff also tends to be drunk alone or with minimal dilution, while the summer gin tends to be mixed into longer drinks (in part because all but the most hardened alcoholics find most gin^note Most gins are in a "dry" style that doesn't lend itself to straight sipping. However, Plymouth gin, a relic of the "sweet" gins of the 18th and early 19th centuries, was specifically designed to be sippable even at "Navy strength" (57% abv), basically because the Navy insisted on it. rather hard to stomach plain,^note And even the "hardened alcoholics" tend to take their straight gin in the form of a a very dry "martini" with vermouth swished in the glass and over the ice to balance the flavours slightly. Only a select chosen few, like Winston Churchill (who only needed to gaze at the vermouth bottle while drinking his gin) and Noël Coward (whose idea of a martini was gin from a bottle that had been "waved in the direction of Italy") truly drink straight gin. in part because the summertime lends itself to leisurely sipping on a long drink quite well), with gin and tonic and fruit cups (particularly Pimm's) being traditional.
• A sophisticated Brit (read: James Bond) will order a vodka martini — shaken, not stirred, and the drier ^note Meaning as little vermouth as possible the better. As far as normal (gin) martinis go, Winston Churchill found it necessary only to gaze at the vermouth bottle from across the room while drinking straight gin and Noël Coward stated his gin should be "waved in the direction of Italy". A truly sophisticated Brit will order the martini stirred, not shaken, and, if asked, will explain that shaking bruises the gin.^note The ins and outs of shaken vs. stirred are the subject of interminable debate, but the issues boil down to this: (1) In general, martinis should be stirred. The charm of the martini is that it is perfectly clear, but incredibly flavorful (and alcoholic). Shaking ruins the clarity by aerating the drink and damages the flavor (and booziness) by diluting it; stirring barely aerates the drink, and the dilution is also much less. The extra bubbles also muck with the clean mouthfeel connoisseurs expect from a spirit-forward cocktail with no citrus or other cloudy ingredients. (2) James Bond did not give a damn about this, but for two good reasons: (a) Bond drank vodka martinis, and drank them during the early Cold War. At that point, vodka was most commonly made from potatoes, and potato vodka commonly develops an unsightly oily film that stirring does not disrupt; only shaking would break up the oil. (b) Bond wanted his drink as cold as possible. Conventional wisdom is that shaking gets a colder (if somewhat weaker) drink; while an Esquire study claims to show that stirring gives a colder drink, its methods are questionable (and most bartenders would vehemently disagree with its result) and (more to the point) there was no way Bond would've known about it in the 1950s and 60s. (3) That being said, the traditional line about "bruising the gin" is codswollop; shaking doesn't damage the flavour of gin very much if at all, as evidenced by the large number of gin cocktails that are shaken, including such classics as the Gimlet, the Aviation, the Clover Club, and the Singapore Sling. The issue is—again—that in a clear, spirit-forward drink like the Martini, shaking aerates the drink, creating unwanted cloudiness and giving the drink an unsettling mouthfeel (not an issue with the traditionally-shaken gin drinks listed above, which are all sours with citrus juice and other cloudy ingredients). If it's summer, the sophisticate may prefer Gin & Tonic or a jug of Pimm's to go 'round.
  • Alternatively, he'll order a cocktail containing three measures of Gordon's, one of vodka (made from grain, not potatoes), half a measure of Kina Lillet, then instruct the bartender to shake it very well until it's ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon peel.^note This was new at the time, but is now called a Vesper after the original source. This is in keeping with the source material, where the patron explains his reasoning behind such strong and persnickety orders and is played very straight. However, he does consistently get a chuckle out of everyone else ordering one as well, which may also apply. In the original books Bond was meticulous about the use of Gordon's Gin. However, liquors have changed over the years; vodka is weaker (break out the Stoli 100) and evidently Tanqueray is closer to what Gordon's was in Ian Fleming's day, so keep those in mind. Also, Kina Lillet has been out of production for quite some time now and unobtainable except in ludicrously expensive cocktail bars that keep a supply; the accepted modern substitute (at least since Daniel Craig's Bond popularized the drink) has either been Lillet Blanc (a close relative but not as bitter as Kina Lillet) and a dash of bitters, or Cocchi Americano which is made with cinchona bark and is much closer in flavour to the original. All this said, around the early 2020s a backlash developed against this drink on the grounds that it isn’t a particularly good cocktail and the only reason anyone ever orders it is to look/feel like James Bond.
  • Complicated NAMED cocktails are also a way to show off between globe-trotting millionaire playboys such as The Persuaders!, as for example a Creole Scream (4 cl White Rum, 2 cl Dry Vermouth, 1 Dash Angustora Bitters, 1 cl Grenadine Syrup, 1-2 Green Olive). Some arguing on a minor detail such as one or two olives is to be expected.
• An 18th-century Englishman down on his luck will have gin. Beer-swilling Middle Englishmen look upon him with disdain - gin was an extremely cheap and plentiful liquor, effectively the malt liquor/rock cocaine/crystal meth of its time and place. (Also lasts into the 19th and early 20th centuries, if Alfred Doolittle in My Fair Lady is any indication.)
• Because it's unseemly for a lady to be seen to drink too much, a Proper Lady will, if she wants to drink heavily, discreetly drink gin and tonic and be careful not to reveal how many she's had. (The Queen Mum was famous for this.)
• A Yuppie will have, "Macallan gran reserva, with a drop", or some ridiculously specific wine (Chateau Neuf, south field, 1978). That, or a bottle of Sol or Corona with a wedge of lime in the neck.
• A non-Yuppie, meanwhile, will just order a Macallan, because it's damn good whisky. Ahem. The Macallan.
• A Brit who wants to be a yuppie or sophisticate, but isn't (such as Del Boy) will order some totally preposterous cocktail, probably with an umbrella in it.
• A character in a crime drama will always ask for "Scotch." The character will rarely specify the type, possibly because the writers don't realize that every Scotch is slightly different. If the character does ask for a specific brand, it will always be Glenfiddich or The Macallan. It's vanishingly rare that anyone asks for a brand of blended Scotch by name.
• A Scotsman or an Irishman will drink their nation's native whisk(e)y.
  • In Hollywood, in contrast to the hundreds of varieties of Scotch whisky, Irish whiskey (yes, they're spelled differently, and the difference is, in fact, Serious Business) appears in just two brands: Jameson and Bushmills. They are largely equivalent, except that Jameson is Catholic and Bushmills is Protestant - thus picking the right one is non-trivial when dealing with particularly militant Irishmen - but this distinction is mostly an American fabrication, based on the fact that the Bushmills distillery happens to be located in Northern Ireland- the Jameson family were Protestant (as were the Guinness family, and most families who actually had enough money to start major breweries and distilleries)^note The Other Wiki explains why.
  • A Scotsman will never order "scotch," but rather "whisky." Nonetheless, they expect to be served scotch because to them, scotch is the default variety of whisky (which is Truth in Television in Britain).
  • The most popular whiskey within Ireland itself is reputedly Powers Gold Label, which is usually hard to come by at any bar in the states, outside of certain Irish enclaves like Boston, New York, and Philadelphia (and sometimes even there).
  • The most popular scotch in Scotland is Famous Grouse, but it is not difficult to obtain in the United States.
• In the UK, thanks in large part to the massively profitable global broadcasting deals negotiated by the English Premier League (the top division of English Football), and to the global merchandising potential of various clubs making it both financially viable and fashionable for the super-rich to own a football club, the entire league has money to burn. As a result, Premiership footballers earn an average of £50,000 per week, and often wildly in excess of that, with the very richest being paid over £300,000 per week - and that's before performance or appearance related bonuses, much less sponsorship agreements, endorsements, and other non-playing related sources of income. Thanks to so-called 'parachute payments' for relegated clubs (paid over the following couple of years, and intended to help them adjust to the disparity in annual earnings between the Premier League and the second division), similar salaries are found in the richer clubs of the second division as well. As a result, players have money to burn, and since they're often very suddenly catapulted from often working class backgrounds to national (even global) fame and immense fortune in their late teens/early 20s, they do. Spectacularly. Accordingly, their "Check out my money" drink of choice seems to be Cristal champagne, at £200 a bottle. Mixed with Diet Coke.
• A character from the West Country will drink cider^note In British parlance, cider is alcoholic; everything else is just apple juice; America is the only place where cider is NOT alcoholic., particularly scrumpy (a type of cloudy, low-carbonation cider with a higher alcohol content), which is often home-brewed, and the inspiration for Scumble - though usually it's a little less alcoholic than its fictional counterpart. Usually. You can successfully run a tractor on the stronger variants (admittedly, not for very long, and it plays hell with the engine, but you can) and any attempt to tax it is met with severe popular displeasure.
  • Since the upswing of sweet ciders in the mid-2000s, Cider has become the main 'beer for those who don't like beer'. Don't expect them to drink anything more dry than Strongbow though.
• Chavs may drink cheap cider, in their local park or tower block. Also, Snakebite (half a pint of beer, half a pint of cider, maybe with some blackcurrent cordial) is popular with chav girls, and also with students and other young drinkers (as it seems to be more alcoholic than the sum of its parts).
• Soft drinks in Britain are generally referred to as exactly that. Regional and time period variations do come in: anyone wanting to evoke the days of Enid Blyton will drink "lashings and lashings of ginger ale." In Scotland, any fizzy non-alcoholic beverage is referred to as "juice" or "skoosh", regardless of whether it's Sprite, Coke, or Pepsi. "Ginger" is also a common generic term for carbonated soft drinks north of the border. Virtually the only drink to be requested by name is Scotland's own Irn-Bru. And even then, it'll generally be shortened to just "bru."
• Cheap Vodka, sometimes mixed with Red Bull, is quite popular with young students, on the grounds that it tastes fairly sweet and gets you drunk quickly. As anyone who's ever been to the bar street in Magaluf (or, indeed, to a bar or club in any university town on a Friday/Saturday night) will confirm.
• A clueless American in an Irish pub will order a "Black-and-Tan" in the hope of getting the nice drink consisting of Guinness layered over Harp lager or Smithwick's pale ale. He will instead get anything from an awkward look to a snarky comment to a punch in the face (depending on place and time period), and maybe his drink. This is because the Black and Tans were particularly brutal paramilitaries called upon to "enforce order" during the War of Independence; the drink goes by the name "half and half" in Ireland and is indeed quite popular under that name.
  • A similarly clueless American tourist will order an "Irish car bomb" in an Irish pub. The bartender will address it with a snarky comment. (This drink has no proper name in Ireland, because the Irish really can't see the appeal of curdled Bailey's—nor, frankly, can many other people who are not Irish, including quite a lot of Americans.)
• When a Brit does go for coffee, it will usually be in the form of instant. Sophisticated Brits will make ground coffee in a cafetiere (French press) or order an espresso drink at a coffee bar. Really sophisticated Brits will use their own espresso machine.

Former USSR

• A Russian will drink vodka, perhaps straight from the bottle.
  • Only in movie-land, though; in real Russia only hopeless drunks and hobos drink vodka straight from the bottle (unless noone is watching or they're muzhiks ^note peasants without the convenience of a glass), and the more common drink of choice would be a cheap beer (straight from the bottle is acceptable with beer—although frankly, it's more commonly straight from the can, since bottled beer is extremely expensive in Russia and a bottle of beer can easily be three times the price of the can for no apparent reason) or the Jaguar brand energy alcopop and even premixed canned cocktails for the youths. Or, you know, vodka, but not straight from the bottle.
    • On the other hand, hopeless drunks and hobos not exactly being in short supply in Russia, some particularly cheap forms of vodka were for quite a long time sold in bottles with pull-tab openings, with the expectation that bottle will be drunk in one sitting—as would its owner. The pull-tabs were banned, but other products catering to the same market—like the bottles of cologne packaged in bottles designed to resemble those of vodka to hide the drinker's shame and the "fanfurik" (alcohol-based medicinal or cosmetic lotions that more often than not are actually just 95% medical alcohol)—have survived.
  • Accurate portrayals will always show normal Russians (i.e. not hopeless drunks and hobos) drinking vodka socially and with food. The traditional way to drink vodka is in small shots (half or a quarter of the traditional North American shot), with friends, while nibbling on snacks (preferably a nice variety). The neutral flavor of the vodka first accentuates the taste of the food, then cleans the palate. The vodka isn't for sipping, but you're not supposed to take so many shots you get uncontrollably drunk. (The Chinese drink their baijiu the same way.)
• Ukrainians flavor their vodka which they call horilka with honey & chili peppers, the end product is called pertsivka. Likewise, people living in Polish-Belarusian border would put some bison grass in it.
• Youths who are punks, rockers, metalheads or members of various other Western-influenced subcultures (the so-called neformalnye) often prefer fortified bum wines such as the infamous "777 Port Wine". Because beer and alcopops are so pop and gopnik. Cheap alcoholic cocktails such as Jaguar are also popular.
• An extra stern and grim survivalist (or just a peasant) will have samogon, moonshine (Pronounced "Sahm-oh-gohn" [samogon] — saying "Sam-oh-gan" [sæmʌgɪn] or "Sum-ohg-en" [səmogɜn] to a Russian will confuse them). Preferably one they brewed and distilled themselves, hopefully with a minimum of methanol in the product.
  • Bear in mind that Russia is the country where government policy has been to encourage beer-drinking as a way of combating alcoholism.
• Intellectuals (both in real life and in fiction) often dismiss vodka as a plebeian drink and prefer brandy (either local ones, of which there are a surprising variety, or, if wealthy and cosmopolitan enough, imported French cognac) or whisk(e)y, with rarity and price of the bottle often being a point of showing off. The same is true for most affluent classes as well, regardless of education.
  • Curiously, asking for French Cognac is usually the sign of being rich; sophistication is more often suggested by choosing a Georgian or Armenian brandy. These are usually called konyak in the region, following some 19th-century confusion.^note To simplify greatly, merchants in the Russian Empire didn't fully digest that "Cognac" was the name of a French region and assumed they could just use the name to mean "good brandy". Good brandy from the Caucasus was therefore marketed with the name "konyak", which the French couldn't really protest about at the time because their system of geographical indications had not yet been fully codified. (Indeed according to one story at least one brand of Armenian brandy, Ararat, was expressly granted the right to be sold as "cognac" by the French in 1900.) The reputation for sophistication may have something to do with the fact that the Caucasus konyak, while at least arguably every bit as good as the French stuff (de gustibus non est disputandum) is definitely always cheaper for comparable levels of quality thanks to both lower transport and labor costs and the absence of the "it's French cognac so it must be better" global snob premium. (Even in the far-off U.S., you can generally get a bottle of 5-year-old Ararat Armenian brandy^note The cheapest stuff exported outside the old Eastern Bloc for less than a bottle of VS^note 2-year-old cognac from a decent distillery.) Also, the Caucasus brandy industry really took off in the 19th century with the adoption of cognac-inspired French techniques, so there's more than a minor hat-tip in the whole delicious enterprise.
• A stereotypical Georgian will most likely drink red wine, preferably in large quantities, which includes Josef Stalin of all people. (The Stalin of Russian Humour is somewhat different from the historical Stalin, being a bit more stereotypically Georgian for comedy purposes, but nonetheless the historical Stalin really did enjoy vodka, brandy, and red wine—all to excess, especially the vodka, to the point that it was probably a major factor in what killed him.)
• Speaking of Georgia, there is chacha, which is essentially grape-based moonshine that was made legal because practically everyone was making it.
• As for hot drinks, tea rules the day almost to the same extent as in Britain. Russian (and other post-Soviet) tea is unique in the manner of its preparation; a certain amount of highly concentrated tea known as zavarka will be prepared ahead of time and left on low heat to keep warm, and when someone wants a cup they'll mix zavarka with hot water according to their desired strength and then sweeten to taste.^note The Turks and Iranians have somewhat similar methods, but they don't really come close. In fiction, especially Western fiction, this tea is often drunk in elaborate ritual around the iconic samovar, with tons of pastries, and jams, and preserves. The latter is more or less Truth in Television, especially in communal setting, but the samovar has mostly died out, the remaining being broken out only for the most important gatherings, as did the oft-depicted way of drinking it from the saucer with a piece of sugar or fruit preserve held in the mouth — anyway, it was only characteristic of the old merchant classes of the Tsarist Russia; if a modern Russian tries to tell you that's the way to do it, they're trolling. In modern days it usually comes from the stovetop or electric teapot, or, in the eastern parts of the country, from the dedicated hot water dispenser, a custom imported from Japan and China, and, arguably, the second coming of the samovar.
  • Note that the type of the tea drunk also carries the class stereotypes similar to the British ones, but it differs not on the basis of what (if anything) your parents did for a living but rather how (over)educated you are personally. The strong and sweet black tea is for the working class too, but also for the coarse and uncouth nouveau riches, while even the poorest intelligentsia would prefer the sophisticated unsweetened types (including green tea, which is almost entirely their territory, excepting the Central Asian immigrant laborers) even if they come from a working-class family.
  • The Mafiya prefers its own type of tea, an extremely strong brew called chifir', at least when denied vodka (that is, in prison—which any "true" vor regards as his home).
  • Coffee is much less popular, but still quite frequent, though its use is also centered among the educated. Blue collars, if ever seen with a cup of joe, will be drinking some godawful instant coffin varnish simply to get their gears move during the night shift, while the effeminate hipsters will spend hours discussing the blends and roasting techniques. This is because coffee is very expensive in Russia. Tea can be had for pocket change, but coffee is several times more expensive. Even the cheapest instant coffee still easily costs double what a tea does, and a coffeehouse roast can easily be twenty times the price of that same cup of tea in exchange for what is just a small shot of coffee.
  • A Russian period piece from before the 17th century may show sbiten' instead of tea or coffee. Sbiten' is a hot, sweet herbal drink made from hot water, honey, spices, and jam that was mostly supplanted by tea, but still persists to a lesser degree and has nostalgic, "comforting drink to warm up in the wintertime" associations similar to those of Horlicks in England, mulled apple cider in America,^note Note to non-Americans: In America, "apple cider" refers to unfiltered, unfermented apple juice. It is not alcoholic. The alcoholic stuff will be called "hard cider" if the two need to be distinguished. and hot chocolate/hot cocoa in both countries (and elsewhere). Sbiten' can, however, also be made with hot red wine (preferably Georgian or Armenian) instead of hot water, in which case it is the Russian take on mulled wine.
  • Mulled wine, in turn, is a popular drink in Saint Petersburg: it's hot and spicy, which helps deal with the city's cold rainy weather, and it's kind of hip, which feeds into Petersburgian intellectual culture. Glintwein, whether alcoholic or non-alcoholic, is sold everywhere around the city, and is even found in vending machines (the non-alcoholic variety, of course).
• The Russian drink order is not complete without kvass, Russia's national soft drink made from fermented rye bread, it's dark, rich, & slightly alcoholic (about 1% ABV). In Soviet era it was served in tanker trucks, and now it's experiencing a revival due to strong surges in patriotism, with the tankers brought back to service once again. A popular contemporary brand is Nikola, which also mean "not cola". Other brands include "Russkiy Dar", "Ochakovsky" and "Kvas Taras". Hilariously, Русский Дар is made by Coca Cola. Kvas is essentially like a beer rye bread hybrid soda. And yes, there are purists who whine about the mass production Квас not really being kvas due to using syrups and concentrates. Even observant Muslims are generally okay with it, because you'd have to drink a terrifying amount of it to get even the same amount of alcohol as in one beer, and with a belly full of kvas, good luck ever feeling anything resembling a buzz, although if you brew up kvas and let it sit for a week, it'll turn as alcoholic as beer.
  • Want to make your own kvass? Let Boris show you how!

Other Europe

• A Norwegian will order pilsener beer, and refer to it as "pils". Brand? What's that?
  • Norway has had a strong non-alcohol policy for decades because of the layman movement, but ask a rural Norwegian for something strong, he will obviously go for the "home made brandy" - distilled beverage with 96% alcohol. This is commonly just referred to as a "ninety-sixer". In some areas, it is mixed up with coffee (Coffee and "karsk", a rather untranslatable term). This home-brewing is known jokingly to be "the most important industry" in some areas of Norway.
• A Swede will order "a big strong one", meaning a half litre of domestic lager.
  • A Swedish student, at least if they're a member of a student's union (often dressing in patch-covered industrial overalls), might order "Punsch" instead. Not Punch; Punsch. Basically a traditional Swedish liqueur made of arrack, tea, citrus, water and sugar. Generally taken as a shot next to the beer.
  • Or a bottle of foreign booze smuggled from Germany (maybe via Denmark) for half the price it would cost at a Systembolaget shop.
  • The traditional Swedish distilled spirit is brännvin, literally "burnt wine"—the same root as English "brandy". It’s not brandy, however: Swedish brännvin is distilled from grain or potatoes. In the mid-20th century, unflavored brännvin began to be sold as vodka, likely to capitalize on the postwar popularity of vodka in the Western Bloc (giving us the contemporary Swedish brands Absolut and Svedka), which are reasonably popular in Sweden but the high prices at the aforementioned state liquor monopoly Systembolaget depress quantity demanded. Traditional flavored (typically with bitter herbs) brännvin is usually called akvavit and has many traditional roles but is less common as a drink of choice.
  • Around Christmas, the soft drink Julmust manages to outsell Coca-Cola. (If you want to sample julmust outside of Sweden, you should look for either a Swedish specialty shop...or an IKEA. Either way, you have to go during the Christmas season.)
  • Also on the non-alcoholic side, Sweden is very much coffee country (like all of Scandinavia). Hot, stimulating beverages are a welcome break in the cold, dark Scandinavian winters. The coffee served is usually drip coffee brewed strong enough to float a horseshoe, and with a cookie or other sweet on the side. Coffee is an integral part of Swedish hospitality (if you stay in a Swedish home for more than two minutes, you will be offered coffee), and for someone drink 6-7 cups a day is quite normal (the average Swede consumes over 1000 cups of coffee per year—that's about 2.75 cups/day).
• Finns drink mostly beer or "lonkero" - a mix of gin and grapefruit soda sold premade in cans.
  • Among some academics there exists a tradition of drinking after shave on special occasions.
  • One of the best selling liquor is "Jallu" or cut brandy that is made by adding a small bit of brandy to neutral spirit.
• The French drink wine. Disneyland Paris almost went out of business when it first opened. Why? Because they didn't serve wine. Business recovered only starting when they put wine on the menu. Wine is Serious Business in France.
  • Many, particularly in the north and east, also drink beer (referred to as "blonde" (light) or "brune" (dark)); a typical "neighborhood bar" is often called a brasserie (brewery). Beers from the north of France, near the border with Belgium, share in the Belgian brewing tradition; since Belgium is basically the world's beer Heaven, beers from the north of France are the best in the country and some are ranked as among the best in the world.
  • Some drinks are seen as more regional.
    • Cidre is often associated with apple-growing Normandie and Bretagne. Both regions also make poiré (perry/pear cider).
    • The aged apple brandy Calvados is named for the Norman department of the same name; the phrase faire le trou normand "to make the Norman hole" means drinking a glass of Calvados between the courses of a meal. For its part, Brittany has its own apple brandy, called lambig. Cidre can also be fortified with Calvados/lambig to make pommeau—basically the apple equivalent of port, and frequently consumed with cheese. Both regions also made eaux-de-vie (clear brandy) from pears.
    • Various aniseed spirits like pastis and Pernod are associated with the south.
  • Also regional is the wine. Each part of the country has its own wines, particularly further south, and locals will drink a simple local red wine with their meals or just in general. An exception to the rule that the wine is red is in Jura, in the eastern region of Franche-Comté near the border with Switzerland; there, the locals will commonly drink vin jaune, a yellowish white wine rather like an unfortified sherry, with some walnuts and Comté cheese.
  • The most widely known spirit native to France is cognac. However, cognac is usually seen as a more upscale drink, perhaps to spirits what champagne is to wines. That said, much like champagne, there's no shortage of modest cognacs that, while nobody's idea of an amazing spirit, are just good enough to sip straight and won't break the bank (a bit like the most common blended Scotches—your Johnnie Walkers and Famous Grouses and Dewarses of the world—and at about the same price point, too). A common spirit in France is eau-de-vie: clear fruit brandy.
  • The French love their coffee, but café au lait is really only drunk from a large bowl at breakfast; ask for un café and you'll get an espresso shot. Late 19th century artists, writers etc. are stereotypically expected to be addicted to absinthe. As for tea, French people who do drink tea will also consider themselves better connoisseurs, like the Germans, favoring more delicate varieties than the strong cuppa of their rival across the Channel. Herbal teas are also popular.
• Italians also drink a lot of wine, although they're usually depicted as being much less snobby about it. Rustic Italians in particular will stereotypically drink chianti out of a straw-covered fiasco (round-bottomed bottle) with a hearty meal.
  • The chianti in the fiasco are really just Tuscan; different regions have different wines and different bottles. That said, any remotely realistic depictions of Italians will have them drinking a simple red wine. Exceptions: White wines may be drunk with certain dishes, and Italians are universally agreed that a beer, especially a cold pale lager, is an ideal accompaniment to pizza—Italian breweries probably survive primarily on sales combined with pizza. (Americans, rejoice: For once, you got something about foreign cuisine right!) A cold beer and a slice of pizza al trancio (a Roman pizza style notable for being sold by weight) is considered a classic snack in Rome in the summer, especially on the beach at Ostia (Rome's port and beach area on the Tyrrhenian Sea).
  • Italians may eat biscotti dunked in vin santo—a sweet amber-colored white or rosé made from partially raisined grapes. In a pinch, they may substitute another dessert wine. What?
  • Besides vin santo, the most famous Italian dessert wine is probably Marsala, a Sicilian fortified wine that's basically Italy's answer to port and sherry. Much like sherry, Marsala wine can be dry, however. Both varieties find lots of uses in Italian cooking (the sweet wine in particular is a common ingredient in Italian desserts).
  • Italians of course also drink espresso—usually with a sugar or two to cut the bitterness. They regard Americans and others who don't as crazy.
  • There's also a variety of aperitivi and digestivi, each with ritual and tradition surrounding them:
    • Aperitivi get a lot of press because of their important role in classic cocktails. Vermouth (an aromatized fortified wine with sweet red and dry white varieties) is a bartending staple; they are workhorses of the cocktail world. The most famous vermouth cocktails are probably the Manhattan (whiskey+sweet vermouth+bitters) and the Martini (gin or vodka+dry vermouth+sometimes bitters^note Usually orange bitters when they're included, to emphasize the "bizarro-Manhattan" nature of the Martini of the pre-Prohibition period.). The powerfully bitter Campari is also common, most famously used in Negronis (which also feature sweet vermouth), but may also be drunk with soda. Aperol, basically a less-bitter Campari, is used in summer drinks like spritzes. The drinks featuring vermouth were typically invented outside Italy (late 19th-century Italy exported vermouth as a drink unto itself, and foreign barkeeps—especially Americans—decided it tasted good with Anglo spirits like whiskey and gin); the ones featuring other aperitivi were most often invented in Italy itself (the Negroni and the Aperol spritz are both pure Italian), though some have variants invented abroad (the Boulevardier, basically a Negroni with whiskey substituted for gin, was invented in Paris by an American bartender).
    • Digestivi are generally more closely associated with Italy, and most commonly drunk neat, straight, or alone over ice. The most common are probably grappa (a brandy distilled from the pomace or dregs of winemaking), sambuca (an aniseed-and-elderflower flavored liqueur—unlike most other anise-flavored distilled drinks, it has a good bit of sugar in it, making it more suitable as an after-dinner drink) and limoncello (a lemony liqueur easily made at home—it just takes some syrup, high-proof grain alcohol, and lemon peel). One digestivo used in international cocktails is Maraschino liqueur (which is also made in Croatia); many old-school drinks like the rum Martinez call for this spirit (which tastes more like almonds than cherries for similar reasons to German kirsch). Digestivi are also used as an ammazzacaffè: a drink drunk after coffee to "kill" the lingering taste of the espresso (this is especially common where the coffee is served after a big dinner). Usually, this is a small cup served after the coffee, but it may occasionally be served with the coffee and is even more occasionally poured into the espresso to create a kind of bizarro Mediterranean version of Irish coffee called caffè corretto (literally "corrected coffee").
    • One class of digestivi with international following are the amari, bitter liqueurs. While most commonly drunk neat or over ice like digestivi both inside and outside Italy, a few, like Fernet, are also used in cocktails (most famously Fernet and Cola—more or less the national cocktail of Argentina, where the mix is called the Fernandito for obscure reasons). Using amari in cocktails is a hallmark of the 21st-century craft cocktail renaissance (for instance, the Paper Plane,^note Yes, it's named after the M.I.A. track a modern classic, calls for both Aperol and the obscure Amaro Nonino).
• Spaniards are also fond of wine, and like the Italians they are generally not seen as being snobby about it; they are particularly famous for sherry, but that is far from the only kind of wine in the country (Rioja is a common wine to name-drop if you want to be seen to know about Spanish wines other than sherry). Stereotypically, wine will be accompanied by tapas, particularly olives, potatoes, chorizo, possibly a tortilla de patatas (i.e. a thick Spanish omelet with potato and onion), and likely fifty varieties of jamón (that's ham).
  • Note that stereotypically is the key word - Spaniards usually reserve wine to full-scale meals and usually accompany tapas with beer. Also, note that sherry is a well-known export, but not actually a popular drink among Spaniards. That said, it is true that tapas probably originated as an accompaniment to wine (beer having taken off in Spain relatively recently), and that sherry was historically more common in Spain than it is now. Also, tapas today are frequently eaten with some of the casual wine-based mixed drinks, e.g. tinto de verano (for which see below).
  • Patxaran (or pacharán), made from blackthorn berries, is typical of the Basque Country.
  • Oruxo (orujo) is an extremely strong spirit obtained from distilled pomace. It's the main ingredient in queimada, a punch so strong it must be set alight before drunk in order to burn some of the alcohol content off: a traditional winter drink in Galicia, and arguably one of the most hardcore drinks in the world.
  • Spain's ample supply of cheap red wine (commonly called tinto in Spanish, and often sold in Tetra Briks like fruit juice) is also the base for various popular beverages consumed (usually in large quantities) during the summer months, including:
    • Kalimotxo (calimocho): equal parts wine and cola. Also originally from the Basque Country, today popular nationwide; its Basque origins give it the additional humorous nickname "Rioja Libre" (by analogy with the rum-and-cola Cuba Libre, as Rioja is near/somewhat overlaps with the Basque Country), especially if mixed with a bit of lime juice. It's the stereotypical drink of the botellón (grand booze-ups for the 18-25 set notorious in Spain for their rowdiness).
    • Sangría ("bloodletting"): red wine, orange juice, sugar and chopped fruit. Today more popular among foreigners than actual Spaniards, mostly because it's rather time consuming to make and most Spaniards can't be bothered.
    • Tinto de verano ("summer red"): red wine and gaseosa, the latter being a kind of lightly-flavored Spanish soda. The lemon-lime variety is the most commonly used for tinto (as it's often called for short).^note For those without access to genuine Spanish gaseosa, the lemon-lime flavored ones can be approximated by mixing equal parts of a "standard" lemon-lime soda like 7-Up and club soda. This is the most popular drink in much of Spain, at least in the summer; it is so ubiquitous in much of the country that it often comes pre-mixed in plastic liter bottles at ludicrously low prices.
  • Finally, cider is a well-known drink of Asturias and Galicia (a.k.a. the Brittany/Cornwall of Spain, both in Celtic heritage and rainy weather).
• Portugal:
  • The Portuguese, like the Spanish, are largely wine-drinkers; Madeira and Port wine are their most famous styles. However, vinho verde (literally "green wine" but more accurately "young wine"—it can actually be any wine color), a young wine from the north of the country, has also gained a global following for its light, refreshing flavor and slight effervescence—perfect for summer drinking. There are also a number of relatively cheap local dry reds and whites for day-to-day drinking.
  • An interesting note on beer in Portugal: unlike most places, where the most popular beer is almost invariably a pale lager, much of Portugal prefers a German-style dark bock.
  • In distilled spirits, Portugal has aguardente, which basically just means "hard liquor", usually distilled from wine. There's also a famous cherry liqueur called ginjinha, made from aguardente, sour cherries, and sugar; it's a common pick-me-up in Lisbon, and is famously consumed out of little edible cups made of chocolate in the nearby town of Óbidos.
• For many Germans it's beer and more beer, but in some regions it may also be wine, especially (obviously) in wine-growing regions. Germans can be expected to drink both, even on one sitting, as there's a popular saying: Wein auf Bier, das rat ich dir, Bier auf Wein, das lass sein. ("Wine after beer is what I recommend to you, beer after wine better not.") In the Frankfurt area cider (Apfelwein, auf Hochdeutsch, Äbbelwoi in Hessian) is also popular. Historically, wine was first introduced by the Romans and during the warmer phase of the middle ages was grown as far north as Pomerania. In Roman times Germans stereotypically drank mead, but then beer took over, becoming the biggest bulk freight good in the Hanseatic League along with salt and herrings. Some German breweries, usually connected to a monastery, go back to the high middle ages.
  • Germans take beer seriously and to some extent regard it more as food than a recreational beverage; you can still hear it being described as "liquid bread". German beer is simultaneously very diverse and very uniform. The Bavarian Reinheitsgebot (beer purity law), the oldest food purity law in the world, mandated that beer be made only of pure water, barley and hops; when the law was applied across Germany after unification, the law was modified to expressly allow yeast (people did not know that yeast existed when the first Bavarian law was promulgated), other grains like wheat (because other parts of Germany had traditions with wheat beer), and cane sugar (to allow fine control of alcohol levels). This means that the basic characteristics of all German beers are rather consistent; German beers tend to be well-attenuated, mildly hopped, and dominated by grain flavors. There are number of brands which enjoy national success, such as Beck's and Paulaner, but there are also many small and regional beers. Many towns have their own local beer, but again, although there is some variation, they do tend to be surprisingly similar. This stands in contrast to Belgium, where the local habit of trying just about anything in beer leads to a to greater variety in beer flavors across a country less than a tenth the size of Germany.
  • Bearing in mind the broad similarities in German beer characteristics, there is a lot of variation in beer culture across Germany. Combined with the constrained variation that is allowed in German beer brewing technique and ingredients, Germans get very attached to serving their regional beers in their regional styles:
    • In Bavaria, manly men are expected to drink lager from Maßkrüge (stoneware or glass jugs holding exactly a liter) at the Oktoberfest. The lager is usually pale (Helles), but dark lagers (Dunkel) are also popular in Bavaria.
    • By contrast, in Cologne, they serve Kölsch, which is actually more or less an ale,^note It's top-fermented at warm temperatures like an ale, but then cold-conditioned. In both process and result, it's similar to the "cream ales" once popular in North America and still regionally popular in regions where a local brewery makes it (e.g. Western New York State, where the Rochester-based Genessee Brewery still makes its stalwart "Genny Creams" in the glass cans). in the smallest standard German beer glassware: a tall, thin, cylindrical 0.2 liter glass called a Stange ("rod")—or a Reagenzglas ("test tube") or Fingerhut (thimble) if you're feeling unkind (or just joking as they do in Cologne). Other parts of the Rhineland drink a similar ale, which goes by the name Alt ("Old") in Düsseldorf and Obergärig in the rest of the Rhineland. However, the glasses tend to be larger than in Cologne, even approaching the half-liter that is standard in much of Germany.
    • In parts of Northern Germany they think you can't be expected to drink a beer "dry", so a beer will be accompanied by a shot glass of clear spirits, thus Lütt un Lütt (Low German for "little and little") means a beer and a glass of kümmel (caraway schnaps).
    • Some regions have a penchant for a lighter beer made from wheat (Hefeweizen). Berlin is one of these regions: in the summer, Berliners will stereotypically be expected to drink a Weiße mit Schuss, i.e. Hefeweizen with a shot of fruit syrup in a big bowl-like glass.
  • Some drinks are seasonal:
    • To quench their thirst in the hot season, Germans may order a Schorle: A flavored drink mixed with sparkling mineral water. When made with wine, it is called Weinschorle; the wine is usually white, but a red wine version exists and is sometimes known by the amusing but slightly offensive name Türkenblut ("Turk's Blood"). It can also be made without alcohol by mixing fruit juice with mineral water; the most common is Apfel(saft)schorle (with apple juice).
    • Another summer drink is a mixture of beer and lemonade (usually called "shandy" in English). The name changes regionally in Germany: Southern Germans called it a Radler ("cyclist's"), while Northerners call it an Alsterwasser or Alster ("Alster water", named after one of the rivers of Hamburg).
    • Related to both Schorle and shandy is the mixture of beer or red wine and cola called a Diesel. This is commonly drunk in the summer, but young people will drink it whenever they can get way with it. When made with red wine, it's the same thing as the Spanish kalimotxo.
    • In winter, especially around Christmas, coastal Germans stereotypically drink grog. The traditional recipe is Rum muss, Zucker kann, Wasser braucht nicht, which roughly translates as "rum's essential, sugar's optional, water you don't really need".
    • Across Germany, the most common winter drink is Glühwein—mulled wine, literally meaning "glowing wine". German versions typically call for red wine with citrus and warming spices like cinnamon, anise/star anise, and clove. Local fruit wines may also be added to the Glühwein.
  • Germany is also well known for various types of spirits, usually clear. The simplest of these is Korn: distilled from grain, and a bit like vodka , but it's less thoroughly filtered so you can taste the grain it came from. Apfelkorn is much the same but from grain and apples. Kümmel is a liqueur, generally distilled from grain and flavored with caraway, cumin, and fennel, so one might think of it as a distant relative of gin. Kirsch is a clear brandy, distilled from cherries and famously necessary for a true Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte;^note Black Forest gâteau/cake; and yes, it's required. By law. This is Germany, remember? darker brandy (Weinbrand) is more of an upscale drink. Sweet liqueurs of more unusual colours are traditionally associated with (tippling) older women. Jägermeister has of course been successfully exported. It's also a common practice to have a shot of spirits after a large meal as a digestif.
  • As regards hot drinks, most Germans prefer coffee (German coffee madness goes back at least to the early 18th century, when J. S. Bach wrote Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht, a humorous cantata, on the subject and Frederick the Great became a huge fan), except in tea-addicted East Frisia (where they drink it in an extremely weird fashion, adding rock sugar and cream and then not stirring, to get a layered effect), although many of those Germans who do drink tea like to think of themselves as better connoisseurs of tea than, e.g., Britons. Germans stereotypically consider American coffee weak (as shown in a running gag in the Percy Adlon film Out of Rosenheim aka Bagdad Café), though not as weak as the "legendary" Bliemchenkaffee^note  "Little-flower coffee"; the name refers to the urban legend that Saxon coffee is so thin that you can see the little flowers at the bottom of the Meissen china cup even when it is full. According to another urban legend you prepare it using one coffee-bean per cup plus one for the pot. of Saxony. In North Frisia (which is situated to the north-east of East Frisia) they sometimes like to drink Pharisäer, coffee with sugar and a shot of rum covered with a layer of cream, which allegedly serves to hide the smell of the rum. The more recent fad for latte macchiato among German yuppies caused amusement in the drink's native Italy; there latte macchiato is considered something you give to children too young to drink proper coffee. Hot chocolate is also very popular, especially in winter.
  • Fizzy drinks and mineral waters are also drunk, the latter often coming from one of the more well-known spas. If you want some caffeine with your fizz, Coca-Cola and Pepsi are the most commonly found brands, but some people will insist on a domestic brand such as Club-Cola (East German, originally produced in the GDR), Afri-Cola (West German, became legendary for its psychedelic ad campaign in the 1960s) and fritz-kola, an "alternative" brand originally started by two students in Hamburg in 2002 (it has the legally permitted maximum caffeine content). German is also home to Club-Mate, a fizzy drink made with yerba mate extract and concomitantly highly caffeinated; it is thus very popular in the German hacker/computer geek subculture (see "Universal" below). Fruit juices are also common, especially orange juice (often listed as O-Saft) and apple juice. Among youngsters, there is a bit of a fashion for KiBa (Kirsche + Banane), a mixture of cherry and banana juice, usually poured in such a way so you get two layers or a pretty spiral pattern.
• Austria is very similar to Germany when it comes to beer and wine (some regions in Austria take their wine houses very seriously). For hot drinks look no further than Vienna, who "invented" coffee for the Europeans when (according to legend) the Turks left it behind after the Siege Of Vienna (along with the Italians, who brought it through trade with Turkey, Syria, and Egypt). Famously, the idea of putting milk in your coffee comes from Austria. Traditional coffee orders are small and large "black" or "brown" (without or with milk), Melange (not the Spice but a cappuccino with whipped cream) and for those who have been skiing and need something to warm up, tea, coffee or hot chocolate with a shot of Stroh rum. Stroh is itself interesting: Historically it was made from sugar beets and flavoring to get close to the flavor of authentic rum made from cane molasses, it is today made from real imported cane molasses (to comply with EU regulations about rum) with flavorings to get that "authentic" sugar-beet flavor.
• Espresso for the euro-sophisticate who wants to sip.
  • In Austria, it is drunk like a shot of spirits. Nice.
  • Espresso with a bit of sugar for the Italians, who are confused most other countries would even consider drinking such a strong brew "black". Mind you, the sugar is not usually quite enough to make the espresso sweet; it's there to cut the bitterness, so the flavor of the coffee can be enjoyed without having to deal with the bitterness. But definitely all espresso, all the time.
• Czechs are not often counted as beer titans, but they produce some world-famous beers such as Pilsner Urquell, which was the first ever pilsner style beer and was created after an angry mob in Pilsen complained about the abysmal quality of local beer... in 1840. Czechvar was the inspiration for Mr. Bursch to create Budweiser (named for the Czech region, Budwar, in which he had encountered pilsner style beer for the first time). Not that anyone is contending that Budweiser holds a candle to the original Czech stuff. In general, Czechs consider their beer good, but not particularly special.
• Traditionalist South Slavs (Slovenians, Croatians, Bosnians, Serbs, Montenegrins and Macedonians) will have a "dec" of rakija made in the countryside and wash it down with a local beer (or wine, if you're in Dalmacija, Hercegovina or Montenegro.)
  • Young "posh" people will have the standard club fare of beer and nouveau cocktails like Jagerbombs and B-52s.
  • Wannabe tough guys will have shots of Chivas Regal and chase it down with Heineken.
  • The "alternative" crowd will either eschew the whole concept of showing off with what you drink and gulp down everything that gets them intoxicated, stick to the traditional (and cheap) Raki+Beer or if they are of the "hipster" variety try to top each other by increasingly obscure cocktails they don't really enjoy.
  • A good Bosnian Muslim who don't want to get drunk will take up some boza, a sweet drink made from fermented corn with negligible alcohol content, much like kvass.
• A Dutchman will order a small glass of whatever's on tap. In summer, a Dutch woman will order a rosé or (if she's trying to be hip) a rosé beer. Or just regular beer. In winter, pea soup is traditional as a drink, especially after a nice day of ice skating. Along with Glüwein
  • However, nine times out of ten, the only beer on tap (or even served at all) will be domestic. German and Belgian beers are also acceptable, but anything else will often be dismissed as weak or low-quality (often correctly, often wrongly). And, of course, every region has its own preference (though it is not as hard coded as in other countries).
  • A harder-drinking Dutchman will have "young" jenever, a clear spirit distilled from grain or malt with juniper and other botanical flavoring (the ancestral form of gin), typically stored in the freezer. Often taken as a kopstoot ("headbutt"): a shot with a beer to chase.^note They do the same across the Belgian border in Flanders, but call it a duikboot ("submarine"), and often do it as a "depth charge" (i.e. they drop the shot glass in the beer).
  • Sophisticated hard drinkers will drink "old" jenever distilled entirely from malt, possibly of the kind that is aged in an oak cask for several years and tastes rather like whisky with botanicals.
• A Belgian, on the other hand, will order an ale from one of the 178 breweries in the country—preferably one nearby—in one of the innumerable styles native to Belgium (dubbel, tripel, witbier, lambic, gueuze, saison, red, blonde, brown...). Said ale will be served in a glass specifically designed to accentuate the unique qualities of the beer, and will be drunk liberally alongside a hearty serving of fries with mayonnaise and mussels. This beer culture is uniquely Belgian, tied to the land as an expression of medieval traditions, good natural conditions for the production of beer, and a trading culture that eased importation of more exotic ingredients. The beer culture exists across the entire country: when a Walloon and Fleming meet, one of the few things they will absolutely agree tie them together is their beer. Also, when the Belgian sees some British tourists talk about getting "good Belgian beer" and then order Stella Artois at the bar, he will laugh so hard he falls off his chair.
  • Note that pale lagers are sold in great quantities in Belgium, but only because they're cheap and easy to get drunk on; that tends to inflate the numbers. The good beer is drunk more deliberately. It's also more expensive, so it doesn't help that Wallonia is basically the epicenter of Western Europe's Rust Belt, with decaying industry and unemployed people everywhere. (Read: Walloons drink Stella Artois for roughly the same reason Wisconsinites, Michiganders, and Ohioans drink Pabst Blue Ribbon—it's cheap, it isn't terrible when it's cold, it gets them drunk, and what else are you supposed to do now that the factory has closed?)
• Greece:
  • Greeks stereotypically drink ouzo, but in some regions they get offended when you ask for ouzo—they instead drink rakki. The difference? Mostly that one is called ouzo and the other is called rakki (both are clear spirits flavored with anise).
  • Truth be told, however, Greeks are at least as likely to drink wine (which they have done for longer than anyone else in Europe). Retsina (wine flavored with pine resin) exists, but it is not drunk universally; it's mostly limited to accompanying strong-flavored medzes like pastirma and garlic dip. Modern retsina contains less resin than in the past, which makes the stuff taste more like wine and less like turpentine, but naturally purists complain.
  • For a hot drink, Greeks drink coffee. It is prepared very similarly to Turkish coffee, but never, ever call it Turkish coffee.
  • Ever since the 1950s, the Greeks have enjoyed frappé coffee for a cold summer drink; it's made by shaking instant coffee with milk, sugar, and ice cubes, creating a cold, foamy, sweet beverage.
• Poles drink vodka. At least, that's the stereotype; for reals it's mostly lost the role it once played as the go-to drink, save for cultural associations (of which there are plenty — vodka is a serious drink for serious occasions, like gifts of gratitude, weddings, or sitting down to discuss politics with your brother-in-law). They will still get into arguments with Russians and others over who invented it, however.
  • Unless getting wasted is the plan, beer is the alcoholic drink for more casual occasions, like friendly meetings, parties and pub crawls.^note You can still get wasted with beer, but if that's what you set out to do, you will bring harder liquors. There is a number of popular beer brands and the pub culture has been growing in popularity.
  • Nalewka is a traditional vodka- or spirit-based infusion. Unlike many other hard drinks, they are drunk in small doses and for the taste. Home-brewing nalewkas is a popular pastime, since all you need to have is liquor, ingredients (mostly various fruits and spices), and patience not to crack the bottle open before it's properly aged.
  • There is an active tradition of moonshining in some parts of the country; unlike the typical associations of moonshine, this is treated as a quaint folkway that everyone pretends is not technically illegal. (The illegality just adds to the appeal.) The actual criminal production of alcohol usually involves smuggling or illegal re-classification of industrial alcohol and is considered about exactly as you would expect.
    • When they don't imbibe aforementioned criminal produce, then just like their Russian counterparts, lowlifes such as punks and bums might prefer to drink cheap, fortified wine-related beverages. These are known under the euphemistic name of "cheap wines"^note and less euphemistically called "pissers", "acids", "brainfuckers", "sulphurfruits" — a pun based on a children's drink brand that refers to sulphurous aftertaste caused by low production quality of the wine — or, more poetically, "wines with a stick written" because of the font a particularly memorable brand's label was written in and are infamous for their colourful brand names.^note Here are some loosely translated examples: "Commando" (with red label), "Here Kitty Kitty", "Bacchus", "Cosmos" (the motto: "In Half An Hour To Moon"), "Tractor Driver's Smile", "Mother-in-law's Charm", "Satan's Sperm"...
  • On an intersection between the two above lie recipes for mixed drinks popular on student campuses. These too have been creatively named, examples being "Panoramix's Cauldron"^note a whole bowl of an unholy mix of beer, raspberry juice, energy drinks, and several other ingredients and "Murky Mississippi".
  • Normal people on an any random day will for the most part choose between tea and coffee. Coffee lovers have been mostly gulping down standard black, perhaps with some milk or sugar. The traditional way is to dump a preferred amount of ground coffee into a cup and pour boiling water in, but recent times and the proliferation of coffee-making machines resulted in the spread of more sophisticated ways. Tea drinkers, for the most part, are happy enough with teabags (usually black tea) and perhaps sugar, a slice of lemon, or occasionally concentrated fruit juice. Milk in tea is uncommon, but sometimes happens. If you are a child, you might know tea-with-milk under the name bawarka ("the Bavarian drink").
• Hungary, being associated with eastern Europe, has the stereotypical association with vodka as has befallen all the regions that ended up has unremarkable local beers but good local wine. The local strong liquors are palinka and unikum. Palinka is a kind of light to clear fruit brandy which comes in a huge array of flavors. Unicum is some kind of herbal spirit allegedly related to bitters, not that Hungarians would admit it. As for the taste, think on the last syllable of its name...
  • Be careful with drink prices in Hungary; oftentimes a drink will come in two sizes with two prices, or even just one price listed (guess which one), and unless you make sure to specify that you want the smaller one at the listed price, you're likely to end up saddled with the bigger and more expensive drink.
  • Speaking of the good local wine, see the bit about Tokaji (Tokay) under "Historical" below.

Australia

• The main Australian drink is known as "piss". It's a generic term for any alcohol from finest claret to beer to absinthe to vanilla extract. Which might or might not slow down service if the bartender happened to be American.
• Australians drink beer. No-name beer, served cold in a glass, no matter where they are. Most Australians drink either Carlton Draught, or the variety of state lagers which are only popular in the given state and have only a vile taste in common: Tooheys New in NSW, XXXX^*(which is where the name of the Discworld's "last continent" comes from) in Queensland, VB^*(full name Victoria Bitter) in Victoria, Swan Draught in WA, Boags or Cascade in Tasmania, and West End in SA^*although in SA you can usually get Coopers instead, a perfectly serviceable pale ale. Outside pubs, the beer is drunk either straight from the can or from a "stubby" (a short, squat glass bottle, in contrast to the "longneck"). A sizeable industry has grown up making foam "stubby holders" designed to keep the ambient heat from raising the temperature of the beer to the point where one might be able to taste it.
  • Not so! "Though Angus loves his whisky dear/And Paddy likes his tot/The Aussie has no drink at all/He drinks the bloody lot!"
  • All of the above beers are invariably characterless pale lagers served at temperatures so cold that even if they did have redeeming features, they would not register on your palate. If an Australian pub boasts 10 different taps, they will consist of 8 different brands of insipid pale lager, plus Guinness and a cider.
  • An Australian will sneer at British beers for being warm and flat and at mainstream American beers as being "pissweak", despite mainstream Australian beer being inferior to the former and indistinguishable from the latter (and unlike the US, where craft beer has fully come into its own and can now be found most places, in Australia... well, we're working on it, honest).
• As for spirits, the most popular overall are various types of whisky, including bourbon and scotch. Jim Beam, Johnnie Walker Red and Jack Daniels are probably the most popular among the masses — whether bought straight or premixed with Coke. But an Australian who can afford truly good spirits, is usually an Australian who will have what are perceived to be more civilised tastes.
  • For bogans, their flagship drink is rum. The rum will be Bundaberg, distilled from the finest sugar and biological waste, and it is always mixed with coke (in some pubs, "Bundy and coke" will be available pre-mixed, on tap).
  • Younger people tend to opt for vodka. The default choice is Smirnoff, which is what clubs and bars mostly seem to carry. An "alcopops" tax was introduced by the Prime Minister in 2008 because of the huge popularity with the youth of Australia of the flavoured pre-mix vodka drinks that are so sugar laden that they were closer to soft drinks than alcohol. Of course, this just meant that bottles of straight vodka were cheaper as opposed to cases of the alcopops, and youth turned to vodka cocktails drinks like the screwdriver, and caused bottle shops to start selling packs of the vodka and mixers together.
• If not alcoholic, Australia offers a fine hybrid of multicultural drink influences. If they are "traditional" Aussie, expect tea. If they are suburbanite, sophisticated, white collar etc. expect espresso coffee or the unique Australian variations, "long black" and "flat white," (espresso diluted with hot water and with milk, respectively. The first is not quite an Americano^*The Americano usually uses a little more water and is therefore usually slightly more dilute, but the real difference between the drinks is the technique used to make them: with a long black, the espresso is poured (or more commonly made) into a cup of hot water, while with an Americano, hot water is added to some espresso sitting at the bottom of a cup. The result is that with the Americano, the hot water breaks up the crema—dark foam—on top of the espresso, while with the long black the crema forms as the espresso mixes with the water and thus remains intact.; second is absolutely not a latte.) Australian coffee is surprisingly strong (an Italian legacy). If they are rich and don't understand what they're drinking, it's Starbucks coffee. Not to mention the variety of European coffee variations. Warning however, for calling them by the wrong nationality. For example, calling Greek coffee "Turkish" and vice versa.
  • Non-alcoholic drinks are also affected by geography - coke is still the drink of choice, except in South Australia, where its sales are outstripped by iced coffee (one of the only places in the world where coke is outsold by anything, in fact). In South Australia, all iced coffee is Farmer's Union, and in the Northern Territory it's Paul's. Other flavoured milk drinks are sold in every supermarket and milk bar, fruit juice is the same as everywhere else, and bubble tea is increasingly popular. Less usual is Australia's fondness for ginger beer in of itself rather than as just an ingredient for alcoholic drinks; premixed lemon lime and bitters is also a strange affectation not seen outside of Australia and New Zealand.
• Drinking wine is not uncommon, middle and upper class Aussies have no social faux pas on drinking it but its still holds a pretentious middle class image amongst working class Australians, with only very special circumstances mitigating this, however if a foreigner were to point that drinking wine is snobbery or excessive in the present context, expect a response of "Weeell I bet you wouldn't know we produce over 100 international awarded red wines, not to mention we have major share of the top white wines on the international market and [Major Winery in the Region] does a fantastic line of Chardonnays, but you wouldn't know that you foreign bastard!". It's often a lot more hostile if the questioner is English, if the person doing the questioning is French even more so. They may drink a lot of beer but they're proud of their wine.
  • Disdain for wine is increasingly a marker of those of very low socio-economic status. You'd be hard pressed to find a manual labourer in any Australian capital city who didn't know their way around a wine shop. (Thank you, Italians. And the globalization of wine. Which Italians in Italy hate. Funny, that.)
  • Cheap white wine is also a popular party drink for the young, bought by the cask^*or even sometimes just in a bag with no cardboard box to hold it rather than by the bottle. The slang term for it is "goon". This leads to the drinking game Goon of Fortune, where players sit beneath a Hill's Hoist (a rotating clothes line) with bags of goon affixed to it, then spin the clothes line until one of the bags hangs over a player. That player must drink from the goon bag.
• Cider experienced a surge in popularity in the late 2000s with the younger population, as they dislike the bitter taste of beer compared to the sweeter fruit flavours in cider.

United States

• A redneck, regular Joe: "Gimme a beer." If he's feeling particularly sophisticated he'll insist on a longneck (bottle). If a brand is mentioned, it is almost always an American beer, and always a lager.^note Almost, because in certain border regions he might ask for a Canadian or Mexican beer. Canadian beer especially in the Great Lakes. It'll still be a lager, though.
  • Craft brewing didn't get started in the US until 1978^note when President Jimmy Carter legalized home brewing, but national beer distribution was extraordinarily difficult until the mid-1970s, so if it's pre-80s, the beer will often be a regional beer. Regional, not Microbrew. So expect Pabst in the Midwest, Rainier or Olympia in the Northwest, Old Style in Chicagoland, Genessee in the Northeast, Narragansett in New England, Ballantine in New York City/New Jersey, and so on. Note that traces of this regionalism remain in the form of distinctive beer styles:
    • In Texas, regional brewery Shiner's most famous product is a bock—which it has produced (except for Prohibition) since 1913. (Lone Star^note The probable inspiration for Alamo is more popular, but it's a standard pale lager.)
    • In the area around Philadelphia, Yuengling Traditional amber lager is king. If you ask for "a lager" you'll get Yuengling Traditional (possibly after being queried "bottle or draft?"). The current formulation dates from 1987, but it's based on a pre-Prohibition recipe that's a reasonable facsimile of what the brewery was making in the late 19th century.^note While Yuengling as a brewery dates from 1829, it was definitely not making amber lager when it opened; that beer style was not even invented until the 1830s, when it first showed up in Vienna. However, amber lagers were the most popular German/Central European beer style by the end of the 19th century, so it's unimaginable that Yuengling wasn't making it before Prohibition. Yuengling has since expanded from Philadelphia to become massively popular throughout the Keystone State, to the point where some small town bars will only have Yuengling (and sometimes also Yuengling Black and Tan) on tap — if you want something else, you'll have to order a bottle or can. ^note  Weirdly, one of the few Eastern PA bars where Yuengling Traditional Lager is not available on tap is in the heart of Philadelphia: McGlinchy's in Center City (very close to the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts and one of the few Philly bars that got themselves an exemption from PA's indoor smoking ban) stocks Yuengling's Baltic porter on tap and only has Yuengling Traditional amber lager in bottles.
    • In Western New York State, Rochester's Genessee Brewery is still making its famous Genessee Cream Ale (affectionately called "Genny Cream"), introduced in 1960. While it looks like a pale lager and could be confused for one at first taste, it's actually a closer cousin to the aforementioned Rhenish German Kölsch and Altbier, and served in similarly distinctive glassware (namely neckless bottles or "glass cans," though longnecks are also available).
• A Southerner will take bourbon — "...and leave the bottle.", as will the Cowboy Cop—unless the cop is Irish, in which case he'll take Jameson. Note that in some big-city police departments, all cops are "honorary Irish", and will take the Jameson (see The Wire for an example—the Baltimore P.D. is one of those departments).
• Combining a shot of whiskey (usually bourbon, but Jameson and Canadian whisky can substitute) with a regional beer to chase is a very traditional combination across the country, especially in dive bars (which often run them as a special at a low price point). This combination is particularly popular in Philadelphia, where it's been known as a "citywide" since about 2010.
• A rich Southerner will take a mint julep. And probably mention the technique of bruising the mint leaves known as "muddling."
• Southerners are also partial to sweet tea... Which is basically iced tea but with sugar. Lemon, raspberry and mint are optional.
  • Southern sweet tea is distinct from ordinary iced tea because it is brewed hot and sweetened before it cools. This delivers a much higher sugar concentration - some sweet teas contain twice as much sugar as Coca-Cola.
  • Note that while most iced tea today is black tea, this is relatively recent, only dating back as far as World War II. Before the war, the U.S. got most of its tea through direct trade with East Asia, and the tea was for the most part green, or perhaps oolong. After the war started, the supply of green and oolong tea dried up, as besides the ludicrously exclusive Darjeeling^note Which is technically an oolong, though the Brits tended to treat it as a very light black tea these were only produced in East and Southeast Asia, which were now either in Japanese hands or at least across Japanese lines, and ain't nobody gonna brave the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy for some dang tea. Americans therefore turned to black tea from British India, Ceylon, and East Africa to make iced tea, and the preference has stuck ever since.
• Irish-Americans attempting to seem more Irish will drink Guinness (or, for harder drinkers, Jameson's). Lampshaded in Ballykissangel where the pub owner considered dropping what was obviously Guinness stout because only one customer ordered it outside tourist season. (In reality, Guinness is also very popular with real Irish people - to the point that, as noted above, "A pint" in most bars in Ireland means a Guinness, and if not it's almost always an Alternate Company Equivalent like Beamish or Murphy's stout.)
• A teetotaler will drink a Long Island iced tea — typically after being convinced by his friends that it's a nonalcoholic drink, or just jumping to conclusions about the name. Hilarity Ensues.
  • This ignores the fact if you're a teetotaler, the taste of alcohol is immediately recognizable. Also, you can order any mixed drink without alcohol by asking for it "virgin," e.g. a virgin strawberry daiquiri.
  • And a "virgin" long island iced tea would be about a shot worth of cola with a little lemon juice and sugar water mixed in.
  • In real life, most bartenders hate Long Island iced teas and judge people who order them; the general stereotype is that people who order them are cheapasses who want to get fucked up for as little money as possible, tip poorly (or not at all), can't hold their liquor, and will do something to get themselves cut off or thrown out well before the night is over. In short, it's viewed as a trashy drink for trashier people. (Important exception: Bars in college towns are usually more forgiving for LIIT customers, since while college students generally are trying to get as fucked up as possible for as little money possible, everyone recognizes that this is because they're broke, not cheap.)
• An Old West cowboy takes whiskey or tequila. A modern Texan might have either, but also likes frosty domestic lagers in their native aluminum cans, and you'd be hard pressed to find a licensed Texan restaurant that doesn't serve at least two varieties of margarita.
  • He's also likely to ask for a bottle of Shiner. Expect him to be very angry if he's out of state, and the bar doesn't have it.
  • If the hero confronts the villain in a Wild West saloon, the bad guy may order two of "the usual" which will be something incredibly strong/borderline toxic/potentially fatal. He downs one like soda pop, and dares the hero to drink the other. Hilarity Ensues.
• Gangstas will drink a "40" (40 fl oz bottle of beer or malt liquor) and pour out a bottle on the ground to remember their fallen comrades. Goes way back to the days of war.
• New Mexicans drink Tecate with lime and salt or, if you have a sophisticated palate, Negra Modelo.
• Fratboys: All the drinks of this entire page in alphabetical order. Twice, with a stomach pump to chase. Alternately, the Fratboy will only be shown choosing drinks that have as little taste as possible, such as bland light beer or vodka cocktails. Alcohol with character will never cross the fictional fratboy's palate. If this is a home event and not at a bar, expect at least one keg, which will be drained dry by the end of the evening.
  • Note that this in no way limited to American fratboys, either.
• College kids will do Jello shots. If they're on spring break in Florida or Mexico, they will drink tequila.
  • Alternately, they will drink any of a variety of awful mass-market economy pale lagers—typically one of the Big Three's "reject batch" beers^note Busch (Anheuser-Busch), Milwaukee's Best (Miller), and Keystone (Coors), although certain particularly vile regionals (Narragansett in the Northeast, National Bohemian in Maryland and DC, Blatz and Hamm's in the Great Lakes,^note Though weirdly, Hamm's has gained a hipster following in the Northeast since about the early 2010s, esentially becoming the second coming of Pabst Blue Ribbon and the historically-Midwestern Pabst Blue Ribbon everywhere) are also in the mix—not because they like it (they usually profess to hate it), but because it's cheap, and gets them drunk.
  • Cheap boxed wines and jug wines are also popular. Pretending to be "classy" ironically while drinking this wine is a surefire sign that you're dealing with intellectuals, if not outright hipsters; actually thinking it's classy just because it's wine is a surefire sign that these students...well...they aren't intellectuals. (Are you sure these students aren't at clown college? And we don't mean the one that actually teaches clowns.)
• Ordinary Joe orders "coffee." The barista at the fancy coffee bar looks at him like he's speaking Martian.
  • Even though you can find "Drip Coffee" on the menu in pretty much any coffee shop, including Starbucks.
• Yuppie wants a coffee: They order the superultradecafmochalatte^note espresso and capuccino are so two weeks ago with extra foam, super hot.
  • Or conversely, yuppie wants a coffee and makes the fancy-schmancy order, only to be offered regular or decaf at a little mom and pop coffee shop.
• New Englander wants coffee. Nine times out of ten, he gets it from Dunkin' Donuts, which has damn near saturated the region. That tenth time will almost invariably be Honey Dew, though Gourmet Donuts is also a possibility if you're in central Massachusetts, as is Marylou's if you're on the South Shore.
  • During the aftermath of the Boston Marathon Bombing of April 2013, the city was shut down almost completely so the cops could search for the perpetrators. Dunkin Donuts were allowed to operate, it being considered an essential service akin to a public utility. And they really are: New England Dunkin' Donuts are basically secondary police outposts.
  • Two South Jerseyans want coffee. Nine times out of ten, they argue interminably about whether they should go to Dunkin' Donuts or Wawa, but end up just going whichever one they come by first.
• Does a New Englander want a nonalcoholic drink other than coffee? Well, probably not. But if they do, it's probably something from Polar Beverages; any number of their seltzers will usually suffice, but if they want something sweeter, an Orange, Pink Grapefruit, or Cranberry Dry or one of their other sodas will serve that purpose just as well.
• The Ordinary High-School Student will often order "Coke", no further specifics (maybe Pepsi depending on who's paid for Product Placement).
  • Coffee is fast becomming an alternative due to the growing popularity of iced coffee drinks and the need to stay awake early in the morning.^note By law, soft drinks are limited in how much caffeine they can have, since they have the kiddie stigma attached to them. Coffee has no such restrictions.
• By the way, in different parts of the United States, the standard term for "soft drink" varies. Most notably, in the Deep South, the generic term is "coke" (occasionally "soda", in contrast to the more Midwestern "pop"), likely due to the Coca-Cola company being headquartered in Atlanta. Conversations like this really do happen:
  Host: Can I get you a coke?
  Guest: Sure. Have you got any Dr Pepper?
  • Pop is less Midwestern and more Minnesotan. The term is also dominant in Michigan, perhaps due to the proximity and influence of Canada, where it is universally used. Asking for a pop in Wisconsin, Iowa, or the Dakotas will generally result in a weird look. Asking for a soda in the north star state, especially outside the Twin Cities, is often greeted likewise.
  • Chicago tends to have a good mix of all three terms, even "coke", which is nearly unheard-of elsewhere in the Midwest.
  • "Pop" tends to manifest in odd areas around the midwest. Where the northern midwest (Except Minnesota) has soda as a common term, it is entirely possible for someone to honestly have no idea what you're talking about unless you say "pop" in Kansas or Missouri.
    • For further reference, there is a widely spread county-by-county map of who calls it what.◊
  • Also, getting a Sprite from the "coke machine". To be fair it probably is in fact a Coca-Cola vending machine, as Sprite is a Coca-Cola product.
  • The term "tonic" used to refer to soft drinks in Massachusetts, but these days, you're unlikely to hear anyone under the age of 60 or so use the term seriously. It's usually simply called "soda."
  • RC Cola is fairly popular across the Southeast, primarily outside the larger cities (where Coca-Cola and Pepsi have pretty much sewn up the markets). The order will vary in its pronunciation: black Southerners tend to say the letter "r" as "ar-uh", thus "Ar-uh-see cola", whereas a white Southerner's order will sound more like "awr-see cola" or "coler". Southern country folks in general will say "Co-cola", which means Coca-Cola specifically.
    • "Co-cola" is used in-universe in Raising Arizona, when H.I. tries to get out of a social engagement: "Matter of fact, honey, I think I'll skip this little get-together myself. Glen won't mind. I'll just duck out with the boys, knock back a coupla co-colas." It's likely that he actually intends to drink beer.
• Hardboiled Detective-types always get whisky. More specifically, it's usually Scotch. If he's ordering a nonalcoholic drink, like in a diner, it will always be coffee, black.
• In fiction, politicians and businessmen have an affinity for martinis or scotch. The latter, possibly because the word "scotch" sounds appropriate to their vocabulary. In real life, their drinks are more varied, but the spirit is right.
• If you're dealing with Seattle, the drink order ranges from drip coffee (in a hurry, not fancy, maybe not much cash) to the ridiculously specific espresso cart order (and will be annoyed when the barista doesn't know how to make it). If he's drinking alcohol, it's usually some kind of microbrew or local wine.^note Washington State has a thriving wine country in the eastern half of the state. And the Yakima Valley 75 km from Seattle accounts for up to 50% of domestic hop production, making it very attractive to small breweries. Almost Live! used this stereotype as a surprisingly rich source of gags.
• An Orthodox Jew will be drinking the hideously-sweet (and just generally hideous) Manischewitz or Kedem kosher wine. Hilarity Ensues when he attempts to obey the commandment on Purim (to be so drunk as to be unable to tell "cursed is Haman" from "blessed is Mordechai") using this wine. (Never mind that beer or various distilled beverages could have done the job just fine and not violated any laws...). Less commonly seen in fiction but almost always seen in Real Life will be a bottle of slivovitz (plum brandy), usually Jellinek, which is adored by Ashkenazi Jews not least because it can be drunk all year round (it is Kosher for Passover).
• Guidos (over-muscled, popped-collar- or tracksuit-wearing, spiky-haired East Coast young men of typically Italian ancestry) will have Jagerbombs and vodka with Red Bull, particularly when clubbing, and especially when clubbing on the Jersey Shore. (Truth in Television, by the way—a private club room in Atlantic City, Seaside Heights, and elsewhere on the Shore will typically get you the room, many bottles of Belvedere vodka, and many cans of Red Bull—and nothing else.)
• Wiseguys will almost always drink something Italian. Hot drink? Espresso. Drink with dinner? Italian red wine (unless it's fish, in which case it's Italian white wine; hey, we're classy!). Drink after dinner? Grappa. Drink to get drunk? Sambuca. The only real exception is beer, where they'll drink the "regular Joe" stuff mentioned above. (This despite Italian brands like Peroni having some presence in the United States.)
• People from regions with new strong craft brew cultures will typically be inordinately proud of them. Chicagoans out of the city can be expected to order Goose Island wherever it appears (despite the fact that it isn't brewed in Chicago anymore...), while Michiganders can be counted on to order Founders or Bell's outside the state even if they aren't partial to either at home (or, more to the point, if they're partial to the other one back home but can't find it where they are). Meanwhile, a few proud Delawareans are willing to shell out for the Dogfish Head...not that Dogfish Head needs the help...
  • Incidentally, if in Europe, many of these aficionados will loudly proclaim that America is today the best place in the world to drink beer. Whether or not this is true (it's certainly more arguable now than it was in the past), it's certainly not going to earn this guy any friends.
  • Related to the Dogfish Head, the brewery's 90 Minute IPA is the semi-official beer of Amtrak's Northeast Corridor, with bottles of the beer being generally available on all Northeast Regional and Acela trains. Not surprising given that Amtrak maintains a major yard in Wilmington and the world's most famous Delawarean is also Amtrak's biggest booster.
• Metal fans can go either way; beer is almost always the exclusive beverage of choice, but it can go anywhere from cheap, inoffensive fare (PBR and High Life, aka "hipster water", are both very common, as are Narragansett and Yuengling in areas where they're available) to high-end craft. The latter is helped by the fact that there seems to be a fairly large amount of brewers who are also metal fans, and the fandom's general emphasis on integrity and authenticity lends itself to the enjoyment of brews made under the same principle.
  • In Europe, where metal culture has a much stronger Scandinavian influence, metalheads will often go for mead in addition to beer, and sometimes even wine so long as it's made from any fruit that isn't grapes.
• The Bourgeois Bohemian will drink wine, probably from the Napa Valley—unless it's from another American wine region that's "an undiscovered treasure." Alternately, a craft beer or whiskey might be substituted when something more "manly" is desired. A non-alcoholic drink will probably be coffee made from fresh-ground beans in a French press, pour-over, or espresso coffee maker—unless it's some kind of particularly fancy tea or herbal tea, brewed from loose leaves instead of a tea bag.
• Women stereotypically drink fruity mixed drinks like Cosmopolitans. Or they'll drink white wine, typically Chardonnay (which has been described as the wine a woman drinks when she wants to get drunk but doesn't want to get drunk quickly) or White Zinfandel (a highly alcoholic, extremely sweet wine which isn't technically a white; it would be a rosé if rosé wine had ever done anything to be associated with the alcoholic Kool-Aid that is White Zin, so it's called a "blush" instead). A woman's coffee order is likely to be a "skinny latte" or some kind of specialty flavor, especially if she's a college student; pumpkin spice latte in the fall, peppermint latte in winter and mocha iced coffee in the summer, all from Starbucks (she hasn't caught on to third wave coffee), are particularly stereotypical. And forget about drinking anything if you're pregnant.
• If it's the fall or winter and cold and someone nearby grows apples, it's a good bet that there will be apple cider (which is non-alcoholic—it's just unfiltered apple juice) and old-fashioned cider doughnuts (which have a small amount of apple cider in the batter, which combines with the cooking technique for a unique texture). The cider may be cold, or it may be hot, in which case some people like adding warming spices (like cinnamon, nutmeg, and clove) and maybe some orange slices or orange peel to make mulled apple cider. This custom is particularly characteristic of the Northeast and Great Lakes regions. Powdered instant hot cider exists as well; it tends to be ghastly oversweet.
• The craft cocktail revolution arguably got its start in America, with bars in New York City like Death & Co. and Milk & Honey leading the charge around 2005. Every major city will have dozens or hundreds of craft cocktail bars and even small towns often have at least one, generally dark spaces with lots of dark wood and Edison bulbs where bearded men in suspenders and tattooed women in dresses that manage to seem both old-fashioned and fashion-forward stir and shake complex, boozy drinks using obscure liquor brands and homemade ingredients. The drinks are frequently mixed to 19th- or early 20th-century specification that differs wildly from "standards" developed after Prohibition; in particular, martinis are likely to return to the 2:1 gin:vermouth ratio (plus a dash or two of orange bitters) that prevailed when the drink was first developed (unlike the "basically straight gin" spec mentioned elsewhere on this page) and favor a lemon twist over an olive for a garnish. Drinks can easily go for twice as much as a cheaper cocktail at a dive bar or restaurant; it depends on the customer if they consider it worth it.
• The New-Age Retro Hippie will drink smoothies made from exotic ingredients, such as algae, as well as non-dairy milks like soy or almond milk. They're also fond of exotic and herbal teas.
• Brandy has two oddly specific followings: it's popular among working-class people in Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (which together drink a considerable portion of the brandy consumed in the United States) and among poor and working-class Black communities across the country. In both communities it's seen as classier than most whiskies.
  • The popularity of brandy in Wisconsin led to the creation of that state's distinctive cocktail, the Wisconsin Old Fashioned. Made with California brandy (not cognac) and calling for the orange and maraschino cherry garnish to be muddled in the glass with the sugar and Angostura bitters, it preserves the "midcentury" style of Old Fashioned even in bars that have switched to more modern "cocktail revival" formulations.
  • American criminals of all races also seem to have the same opinion of brandy; as a result, even "standard" cognac (the 750 mL bottles of Hennessey and Courviosier VS) is often kept behind the counter in liquor stores even when more expensive liquors (like fine scotches, bourbons, and liqueurs) are displayed in the aisles.
• Canadian (rye) whisky is historically popular in the Northeast and Great Lakes, plus Alaska—i.e. the places with the strongest historical links to Canada. Because American whiskey connoisseurs prefer single-distillery, small-batch (if not single-barrel) bottles, while Canadian whisky is almost universally a blended product of multiple distilleries, Canadian whisky is generally cheaper than (most) American whiskeys. This synergizes with its popularity in the Rust Belt to give it a distinctly working-class connection.
  • Among American drinkers of Canadian whisky, Crown Royal is generally considered best, both neat or on the rocks and mixed with Coca-Cola. This is especially true in Michigan (a top candidate for "most Canada-like place that is not Canada"), where "Crown and Coke" is the classic bar drink of a working man who has just come into a bonus/a raise/a small inheritance/gambling winnings.
  • Historically, Canadian Club was even better regarded than Crown Royal; well-aged Canadian Club is Don Draper's favorite tipple, which would not be remarkable in the 1950s and 60s.^note It also makes a kind of sense; he was born in rural Illinois outside Chicago, and moved to Hershey, PA when he was ten. However, modern consensus is that Canadian Club isn't as good as it used to be, though it's still better than the cheapest ones.
  • The cheapest Canadian whiskys—most famously Canadian Mist, Black Velvet, Rich & Rare, and McMaster's—are very popular among poor drinkers in the northern U.S. who like whisk(e)y, from drifters to down-on-their-luck blue-collar types to broke college students. Rich & Rare is particularly popular in the tiny settlements that dot the vast wilderness of Alaska.
• Of particular note is New Orleans, whose love of drink has had an outsize effect on the drinking culture of the United States, but still has a number of unique drinks of its own:
  • One of the earliest New Orleans drinks is the Ramos gin fizz, made of gin, lemon juice, lime juice, sugar, egg white, soda water, and cream. Yes, cream. The gin, juice, sugar, eggs, and cream are shaken together thoroughly^note Some accounts suggest that pre-Prohibition barkeeps would shake the drink for twelve whole minutes, though more recent exponents of the drink suggest that only a minute or two is really needed and poured into a Collins glass so the egg white forms a foam thick enough to stand a straw in, the soda water is poured in until the foam rises to half an inch or more above the top of the glass, and the whole affair is then topped with orange flower water to mask the "wet dog" smell of egg white. 19th-century New Orlineans drank this at breakfast.
  • The most famous New Orleans cocktail is the Hurricane, made from rum, lemon juice, and passionfruit syrup. Popular with Mardi Gras revelers, especially tourists.
  • The Sazerac, a variation of the Old Fashioned made with cognac or rye with sugar, absinthe, and the New Orleans favorite Peychaud's bitters (which have a more floral flavor than the more typical Angostura bitters).
  • After absinthe became hard to find due to bans in both France and the US, New Orleans invented Herbsaint, another anise-flavored liqueur, as a substitute. It is produced to this day, and has developed its own culture; it's also acceptable as a substitute for the traditional absinthe in a Sazerac.
  • The (historically bourbon-based) liqueur Southern Comfort (Janis Joplin's favorite tipple) also has New Orleans roots, although production moved to Tennessee in the 1880s.
  • For nonalcoholic drinks, New Orleans is famous for its unique coffee, which includes chicory root (a legacy of Civil War rationing). Most typically drunk with a New Orleans-style beigniet (and possibly with a splash of something stronger in it).
• A few places in the U.S. are noted for their...odd...traditional drinks:
  • Chicago is mostly a beer city (its traditional mass-market lager is Old Style, and it's home to a respectable craft brew scene), but it is also noted for its one distinctive liquor: Jeppson's Malört. "Malört" (as it's commonly called) is at least nominally a brand of bäsk, a kind of Swedish-style akvavit (spirit with botanicals) that is specifically flavored with wormwood and supposed to go well with heavy, fatty Swedish food. However, malört is by practically universal acclamation the most foul-tasting liquor available in North America, if not the world, that goes with nothing except sadness and is really just a practical joke Chicago is playing on the rest of the country. Attempts to drink it with heavy, fatty food (Swedish or otherwise) like traditional Swedish bäsk still do the stuff no favors; the flavor is just that awful. Nevertheless, the "Chicago handshake"—a shot of Malört with an Old Style to chase—is widely advertised at Windy City bars.
  • Tiny Washington Island, Wisconsin, a rural tourist area off the tip of the Door Peninsula jutting into Lake Michigan, is one of the world's largest consumers of Angostura bitters (if not the largest).^note For those not in the know, Angostura bitters are the canonical bartender's bitters, produced by the House of Angostura, a distillery originally from the city of Angostura (now Ciudad Bolívar) in eastern Venezuela. The bitters wer originally a medicinal concoction made by Simón Bolívar's German surgeon-general to improve digestive health among El Libertador's soldiers. However, the producers packed up and moved to Trinidad in 1876. It contains a very, well, bitter mix of herbs and spices; the exact recipe is unclear, but it's generally accepted that it includes gentian root (because they've all but admitted it) and cinnamon (because anyone who pays attention to these things can taste it in there). Why? The people there take shots of the stuff. Please note: "Ango" is widely considered to be so bitter as to be non-potable if drunk in greater concentrations than a few dashes (i.e. a few milliliters) in a full-size drink. The reason here is that during Prohibition, the enterprising local barkeep realized that bitters were considered "medicinal" and were thus legal to buy, own, and sell even though they had about as much alcohol by volume as a strong whiskey. He promptly began to sell shots of the stuff, and it became a tradition that never went away even after Prohibition did.

Canada

• Alcoholic: Beer. Usually Canadian beer (typically either Molson or Labatt), though European beer is also acceptable. But not American beer, which has been the target of ridicule since time immemorial (ironic, since Canadian mass-market lagers are viewed with similar derision in the US).
  • Certain brands are distinctly more popular in some provinces, though, such as Sleeman's in Ontario or Keith's in Nova Scotia. Iconic beers in the prairie provinces are Old Style Pilsner (referred to as just "Pilsner", or "Pil" for short) and Bohemian (nicknamed "Boh"), both currently made by Molson. On the west coast, the cheap beers of choice are Lucky Lager and Cariboo.
  • Note that some Americans, particularly those from the Northeast and Great Lakes states, are fond of Canadian beer. Indeed, in some places, it's sort of unusual not to find Labatt or Molson on tap.^note Typically Labatt, as it's a subsidiary of Anheuser-Busch InBev rather than MolsonCoors; Budweiser and A-B products are everywhere, while Coors' distribution at bars is rather less widespread in the Great Lakes and its' relationship with its other partner, Miller, is a joint venture rather than subsidiary. Corporate beer, how you annoy us.
  • American microbrews can be acceptable—when they manage to cross the border, that is. Canadian microbrew is somewhat less developed than the American, but still has a strong showing; particularly popular are the Quebec breweries, especially Unibroue (which is oddly owned by the Ontarian Sleeman's) whose Belgian and North French-inspired beers are considered among the finest in North America (the tripel La Fin du Monde in particular is considered to be a must-try for all lovers of Belgian-inspired beer in the New World, and well deserves its champagne-like bottle).
• The classic heavy liquor is Canadian [Rye] Whisky, though really any hard liquor will do. It should also be noted that, due to a primarily Scottish and English influence on the drinking culture of Canada, whisky forgoes the "e" seen in America and Ireland.
• The Caesar: Canada's answer to the Bloody Mary uses clamato (a blend of tomato and clam juice) for flavouring.
• Wine is becoming more popular, partly due to Canada's increasing reputation in the international wine community (particularly icewine and dessert wines).
• Non-alcoholic: Coffee. Which is to say, drip coffee, served "double-double" (two creams, two sugars), and purchased from Tim Hortons, which is even more popular in Canada than Starbucks is in the United States. Starbucks (along with other specialty coffee chains) does exist, but is only popular in the heart of large cities. People who drink there have even more of a "yuppie" reputation than in America, because of the essential "Canadian-ness" of Tim Hortons.
  • This may vary from area to area; out West Starbucks has more of a hipster demographic than a yuppie one. See Less Than Kind for an example.
  • Tim Hortons has fallen off in recent years, due to a merger with Burger King and a corresponding cost-cutting initiative. In particular, they dropped their previous coffee supplier, to the detriment of their drink quality; said supplier then began supplying coffee to McDonald's in Canada.
• Tea is also popular in Canada, though not quite so much as in other Commonwealth countries. Its greatest popularity is among the First Nations, who acquired the taste from the British traders and trappers of the Hudson's Bay Company.
• Canadian soft drinks are also made with sugar as opposed to corn syrup - and with cleaner water than their other North American counterparts. This means that Canadian visitors to points south of the 49th generally find any soft drinks served them to taste odd, if not outright bad, and also leads to the prevalence of flavoured variants which are less popular (and less available) in Canada. Soft drinks in Canada are usually referred to as "pop" and Coke means exclusively Coca-Cola. Note that until March 2010, non-cola soft drinks (7-up, Mountain Dew, ginger ale, etc.) in Canada were generally not permitted to contain caffeine, and still may not.
  • "Rum and Coke" (known elsewhere in the world as a Cuba Libre) usually means exactly that - dark rum (preferably, although some order with light) mixed with Coke-thank-you-very-much. Lime is optional (as Canadian Coke tends to taste better) and may have to be specifically requested (i.e. "With a twist). Sometimes referred to as "Down And Dirty." Use "Rum and Diet" for the sugar-free variant.
• Smirnoff Ice is a relatively popular pre-mixed vodka drink in clubs or for parties. Although dismissed as "cheerleader beer" in the United States, this is because the American and French versions are made with malt liquor and generally have a lower alcohol content. The vodka variety sold in Canada has no social stigma attached when drunk at clubs or dance parties.
• Coolers and pre-mixed drinks of various kinds like vodka sodas and sweet iced tea mixed with liquor have become increasingly popular among the late Millenial and Zoomer generations of both genders, due to their easy-to-drink qualities.

Latin America and Caribbean

• Brazilians will order a beer (usually of one of the major 4-5 brands) as a cheap drink, a caipirinha (cachaça with lemon or lime, ice and sugar) at a party or a shot of cachaça (sugarcane spirit; if you're a real Brazilian, you'll call it by its diminutive cachacinha) if they want to get piss drunk.
  • Note: cachaça is not rum. Rum is produced from molasses—the thick, brown, sweet byproduct of refining cane juice into cane sugar. Cachaça is distilled from raw cane juice. This distinction is confused by the existence of rhum agricole from Haiti and other parts of the French-speaking Caribbean, which is made from raw cane juice, but whatever.
  • An important point about the caipirinha is that the limes are classically muddled with the sugar before the cachaça is added, rather than the limes being juiced into the vessel. This releases a lot more of the bitter but aromatic oils to be released from the lime peel than you'd get in, say, a daiquiri, and consequently a caipirinha is usually a lot more bitter than similar rum-lime-sugar cocktails. The muddling process also generally leaves a lot of the sugar undissolved in the glass. (That said, many Brazilians don't bother with the granulated sugar and use simple syrup for sweetness.)
• The island countries of the French Caribbean are noted for the aforementioned cane-juice-derived rhum agricole. A common cocktail is ti' punch (a Creole term derived from the French petit ponch, or "little punch"), consisting of rhum agricole, lime, and sugar, with or without ice (rather like a caipirinha)—with the twist that the drink is most commonly served with the host setting out the ingredients (and ice) and letting the guests mix for themselves (or as they say in French, chacun prépare sa propre mort—"each prepares his own death").
• Cuba:
  • Cuba, for those in the know, is famous for Cuban coffee (or café cubano if you're being extra-pendantic), a form of super-strong espresso distinct from standard espresso by being sweetened with demerara sugar as it's brewed. Cubans (and Cuban Americans, especially Cuban Americans in Miami—and, these days, even Miamians who aren't Cuban) drink Cuban coffee in small cups; Cuban café con leche is also popular both in Cuba and among Cuban Americans and Miamians, consisting of Cuban coffee with milk, served with buttered, toasted Cuban bread as a breakfast item. White American tourists in Miami (or now that relations have been normalized, Cuba itself, one supposes) who don't know what they're doing will demand to be served a full cup of straight Cuban coffee, and be startled at the results (the comedian Ralphie May once did this, and said, "for the first 30 minutes, I could see into the future!" He then promptly crapped his pants).
  • Cuba is also historically famous for its rum. Historically, because many Cuban distilling families moved to Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and elsewhere after the Revolution. That said, rum remains popular on the island itself, and the Communist government has largely (though imperfectly) managed to maintain production standards (much as the Soviets maintained the quality of Stolichnaya vodka). (As a result, "real" Havana Club rum from Cuba has a similar status for American bartenders and cocktail aficionados that "real" Cuban cigars have for American cigar aficionados.)
  • A famous Cuban cocktail is the daiquiri, consisting of Cuban rum, lime juice, and sugar or simple syrup, shaken with ice, and served straight up in a cocktail glass or champagne coupe. (Yes, rum, lime, and sugar is a popular combo.) If you muddle the lime juice and sugar/syrup with some mint leaves in a Collins glass before adding the rum, stirring with ice, and topping off with club soda, you have the summer classic mojito.
• In the media, in the (English-speaking) Caribbean they apparently only drink rum, or maybe tropical smoothies or ginger beer if they are children. Has elements of Truth in Television as rum production started in the Caribbean and continues to be a major industry there, hence its popularity. Indeed, the typical working-class drinking establishment in the Anglo Caribbean is called a "rum shop".
  • Except for Jamaica, because that's where Red Stripe lager comes from.
  • Barbados is home to the well-known Mount Gay Rum distillery. It also has a national beer, a watery, unremarkable lager called Banks, drunk by locals and tourists alike.
  • Trinidad is home to the world-famous House of Angostura, makers of Angostura bitters, a staple of bartenders worldwide. In Trinidad, the bitters have all their usual uses, but are also used in an unusual form in the country's national coctail, the famous Queen's Park Swizzle: Aged Guyana rum, lime juice, sugar, mint, and 1-2 ounces (15-30 mL) of Angostura bitters,^note In most cocktails, "Ango" is measured in dashes, i.e. a few drops (maybe 2-3 mL). The stuff was legal to import to the United States during Prohibition because even though it was over 40% alcohol, its bitter ingredients supposedly made it non-potable on its own. So even 1 ounce in a drink is...a lot.. swizzled with crushed ice. The House of Angostura also makes a range of well-regarded rums, which only rum aficionados really ever talk aboout.
• Mexicans in non-Mexican works will be usually seen ordering tequila. However, tequila is really mostly charactaristic of the central-western state of Jalisco, particularly the state's capital and largest city of Guadalajara (also Mexico's third-largest city), where the town of Tequila is an hour-long drive away. (Of course, as proud jaliscienses will tell you, "Jalisco es México."^note "Jalisco is Mexico—and they're not wholly wrong; a lot of what is today considered all-Mexican culture even in Mexico (e.g. mariachi music) was originally just from Jalisco.) In Mexico City it's far more common to see people ordering rum or brandy, though mezcal makes an appearance among some classes. In most of the North, they very much prefer whiskey and Tecate or Pacífico beer.
  • Mezcal—a category of roasted-agave-based spirit which (under most definitions) includes tequila, but is also much broader—is also reasonably popular. Its heartland is a north-south belt running from Tamaulipas and Durango down to Guerrero and Oaxaca, as this is the best area for agave. An important point: while the most famous mescal (tequila) does not have a noticeable smoke flavor, the roasting technique for most mezcals basically smokes the agave hearts. (All mezcals call for roasting the agave hearts to break down the non-fermentable complex sugars in the hearts into fermentable simple sugars, but the process for tequila isn't as aggressive.) As a result, mezcal has a generally smoky flavor profile, sometimes extremely so (comparable to an Islay Scotch in smokiness if nothing else). Requesting mezcal therefore can have a variety of connotations: in Mexican works it can mark a character as too poor to drink the more sophisticated rum, brandy, whiskey, or tequila or as someone overly proud of their region; it can also be used to mark the character as being (or pretending to be) badass and manly much like a smoky Scotch (given how much both drinks are compared to tire fires). More recently, mezcal has gained a reputation as an avant-garde cocktail ingredient both in Mexico and the United States, so having mezcal on hand can suggest that the person is really into cutting-edge mixed drinks.
  • If someone's done their research, a Mexican period piece set before 1920 or so will feature pulque as a drink of choice for many Mexicans. Pulque, like tequila and mezcal, is produced from agave; however, the process of producing pulque is very different, as instead of roasting agave/maguey hearts and crushing them to extract the syrup, the plant is instead allowed to grow to the point where it is almost going to enter the flowering phase (which takes twelve years at least), and then has a big hole cut in the top part of the heart, allowing the aguamiel (sap/syrup/nectar) to flow. The aguamiel is then collected, and fermentation (uniquely) takes place by the action of the bacterium Zymomonas mobilis rather than yeast. The drink was mostly killed by a concerted Scare Campaign by the recently-arrived beer industry (which came with German and other Central European immigrants), who touted beer as being "cleaner" and "healthier" and more "modern" than pulque (which they accused of being made with human feces—falsely, by the time they started saying it^note At some point in history, bags of feces—definitely animal, perhaps even human—called muñecas had in fact been used to accelerate the fermentation process by a small minority of pulque makers, but by the time of the anti-pulque campaign by the beer brewers, the muñeca—whatever feces were in it—was a thing of the past.). Ever since, Mexico has been lager country, but pulque survives in some niche areas.
  • Speaking of lager, beer is a pretty much the standard alcoholic drink nationwide. Due to the aforementioned German influence, most commercial beers in Mexico are lagers, usually of the pale variety (although amber and dark lagers are common too, like Negra Modelo or the beloved Nochebuena, a Bock which is only available during late Fall and Winter, as a staple Christmas beer—the name means "Christmas Eve", the usual time for family Christmas festivities in Mexico). The most famous of these worldwide is Corona, but there are many other brands that share its popularity inside Mexico.
    • Beer in Mexico is often drank as is, or drank in micheladas, a popular cocktail made with lime juice, hot sauce, worcestershire sauce, and ice, topped with beer on a salt-rimmed cup. May or may not include clamato (clam and tomato juice). Widely known as a mild summer drink, and a common remedy for hangovers.
  • You know a writer has really done the research when they mention sotol as a spirit drunk in the far north of Mexico. Made from the fleshy roasted hearts of the "desert spoon" (a spiny distant relative of the agave family), this drink is more or less limited to three Mexican states (Chihuahua, Durango, and Coahuila) plus Texas.
• In Central America and parts of northern South America (particularly Colombia), a form of rum known as aguardiente ("fire water") is quite popular. Aguardiente is somewhat different from standard rum in that it is generally infused with anise and has a bit of extra raw cane juice added at the end.
• Both Peru and Chile have good land for viticulture, and produce some decent wines; Chilean wine today is especially widely exported. However, the actual Chileans and Peruvians themselves are most fanatical about a form of brandy distilled from their wine known as pisco. Never get in between a Peruvian and Chilean arguing about who invented pisco, or who makes the best pisco, or who gets to call their brandy pisco. That said, if you are in Peru or Chile, do drink whatever the locals are saying is good pisco.
  • You should also most definitely try whatever they are saying is a good pisco sour, which is mostly like a whiskey sour but made with pisco rather than bourbon. (Besides the different spirit, the major difference is that the egg white foam on top is essentially mandatory instead of being an optional flourish.) The drink was a successful experiment by an American bartender in Lima in the early 20th century and is known in cocktail circles as quite tasty.
  • Similar to pisco is singani, a brandy made in the high valleys of Bolivia. One of the few points of agreement between Chileans and Peruvians is that singani is not pisco. Fortunately for all involved, Bolivians largely agree and are mostly content to watch their neighbors fight with amusement. (Note: Steven Soderbergh became a fan of the stuff while filming Che and has spent over a decade trying to get it to catch on in North America; Bolivians wish him luck, but so far he hasn't had much success.)
• Argentina:
  • Like its neighbor Chile, Argentina is noted for its wine culture. The wine will always be Malbec. Always. (Note: Malbec is a neglected varietal in its native France, but it thrives in Argentina and has indeed become the "standard" red there. It doesn't help for stereotype purposes that Argentine Malbec pairs well with steak off the parrilla, the stereotypical Trademark Favorite Food of every Argentine.)
  • As noted in the section on Italy above, Argentina is one of the best markets outside Italy for traditional Italian amari, particularly fernet, thanks to its large population of Italian ancestry. The Fernandito or fernet con coca—a mix (in varying proportions) of fernet and Coca-Cola—is a staple of Argentine parties, to the point where it's been called the country's national cocktail.
  • More sophisticated Argentines wanting a cocktail will order a Clarito. What's a Clarito? It's a dry gin Martini—always stirred, and always served with a lemon twist, not an olive. (This one may be down to Argentina's longstanding trading relationship with Britain.)
  • Italian influence can also be seen in Argentina's coffee culture, which is heavily based on espresso.
  • Someone trying to be seen as extra-Argentine will be drinking hot mate from a calabash with a bombilla (metal straw with a bulbous strainer at the bottom to keep out the bits of yerba mate). While stereotypical, it's a legitimate local product and part of the culture—when Pope Francis visited his native country for a visit with its president, they made a point of being photographed drinking mate, calabashes and bombillas and all.

Sub-Saharan Africa

• Palm wine—made from the sap of palm trees—is a traditional favorite in West Africa. It's the same thing as the aforementioned Indian palm toddy. However, beer is seen as more modern, so generally palm wine is used to evoke precolonial times and ancient traditions (for instance, the Igbo people of Nigeria use it in traditional weddings).
• Guinness is very popular in Nigeria, to the point where it's seen as a national beer. It's so popular, in fact, that not only is there a Guinness brewery in Nigeria, the Nigerian Guinness gets exported to the UK and Ireland to serve the local Nigerian immigrant communities.
• Millet beer is stereotypically Central and East African.
• Very East African is the spiced mead tej, particularly endemic in Ethiopia, whose sweetness despite the spicing (also a bittering agent) hides a massive hit of alcohol.
• South Africa:
  • Carling—still called Black Label—is a standard bar beer in South Africa
  • South Africa has developed a thriving wine industry since the late 20th century, with a reputation for excellent wines at a good price. Naturally, more sophisticated South Africans have embraced this local wine as a drink of choice.
  • People who enjoy spirits but do not wish to be seen as alcoholics will mix their shots with water.
• Across Africa, import duties on liquor are very high (with a few exceptions), so only the super-rich will be seen drinking it. Moonshine is much more common, referred to in Uganda as waragi and Kenya as changaa. African moonshine is commonly drunk in the local community where it's made, but has a reputation for quality ranging from poor to outright poisonous. Drink at your own risk.

Middle East and North Africa

• The stronger presence of Islam in the Middle East means that alcoholic beverages are a bit harder to come by. The most common choices are tea, coffee, herbal drinks, and soft drinks.
  • While some countries, like Saudi Arabia and Iran, have Culture Police who enforce the drinking ban, alcohol is actually legal in most of the Middle East, if rather stigmatized socially in some places. As a result, you'll find the region's substantial non-Muslim minorities, as well as many less observant Muslims, indulging in... well... let's be honest, it's still hard going:
    • Every country that allows it has a single dominant brand of beer. These are rather different in some ways, but much like the beers of the Australian states, share a common vile taste, with the added benefit of no quality control (alcoholic percentage is typically given as something like "3.5-6.5% abv", and the flavor ranges within a single brand, bottle to bottle, from "not unpleasant" to "ohmygod, I can't believe I'm drinking something so foul"). The most well-known of these is the Egyptian Stella (unrelated to Stella Artois and often pronounced "Istella"), if only because Egyptian movies and TV are so ubiquitous in the Arab world. These awful beers are typically found in the hands of people short on cash (including students) and the sorts of unpleasant men who frequent the bars that double as brothels.
    • Domestic wine and liquor will almost inevitably be a cheap^note In some areas, you can get the stuff for less than $5 US for a 750ml bottle and foul imitation of something foreign. There are two exceptions. One is Lebanon, where the Christian and secular populations are large enough (together, they probably form a majority) to warrant attention to quality. The other is araq (aka arak, raki, rakia, and ouzo, and not to be confused with Iraq, or a Balinese drink of the same name) the native liquor of the Eastern Mediterranean. This is a sort of clear grape brandy flavored with anise; the long tradition of making the stuff means that the quality is actually halfway decent (although not always). It is drunk by mixing 50-50 with water, which turns the stuff from clear to milky-white by bringing the essential oil of anise out of solution and into an emulsion; sugar may be added as well. Araq (by all its names) has connotations of poor farmers and laborers in the 19th century and nostalgia for those times (and therefore nationalism); the foul, cheap wine and liquor are again associated with poverty and sleazy-looking johns.
    • Wealthy, secular types will have imported liquor. Depending on the country, this means that it was either imported legally, in which case high tariffs have been paid on it, or illegally, in which case it will command a high price on the black market. Or it will have been purchased at the duty-free store, which while cheaper than the other two options indicates foreign travel—a relatively expensive luxury. Either way, it's more expensive. The brand doesn't matter terribly much, as it's a mark of wealth that you could buy the stuff in the first place, but for whatever reason, the rulers of oil states and other such men are stereotypically associated with Johnnie Walker Scotch—and the most expensive kind within their price range, if you please. Christopher Hitchens—himself a fan of Johnnie Walker—noted that Johnnie Walker Black Label was the favorite drink of the PLO, the Iraqi Baath party, and Muammar Gaddafi.
    • A guy who wants to be seen as "manly" or "cool" enough to drink beer without breaking the Islamic prohibition on drinking alcohol will drink alcohol-free beer and try to avoid grimacing. His drinking friends (if he has any) secretly laugh at him.
  • One more thing to mention: Many of these countries have illegal moonshine operations. One of the biggest markets is Sudan, which has enforced an alcohol ban (poorly) since The '80s: the traditional date-liquor araqi (unrelated to araq except by name; they both derive from a term meaning "sweat") is by all accounts rampant in the countryside and in the vast working-class neighborhoods of Khartoum. Moonshining is also fairly big business in Iran, although not as big as bootlegging of foreign liquor smuggled in from a variety of other countries (typically via Iraq, Turkey, Azerbaijan, or Armenia) or booze bought secondhand from the country's non-Muslim minorities (there are substantial communities of Armenian and Assyrian Christians and—believe it or not—Jews in Iran), who can get alcohol legally.
  • Also, the coffee, tea, and herbal drinks? Most of them are pretty good, and any traditional coffee shop/tea house will have a smorgasbord of them ranging from the typical (hot tea and direct-infused coffee) to the interesting (mint tea, hibiscus tea, cinnamon tea) to the medicinal (e.g. hot lemonade with honey and mint for sore throats and ginger tea for sour stomachs). There are also some drinks that are just weird, the strangest being a thick drink what the Arabs call sahlab, the Turks call salep, and the English called "saloop" back when they drank the stuff four hundred years ago. Made from ground orchid root and flavoured with cinnamon, this stuff is said to help with male potency—and given that orchids are called orchids because their roots look like balls and the actual drink is thick and milky white, you can see why.
• Israel is an exception to the aforementioned presence of Islam.
  • American Jew visits Israel and is offered a Kosher wine. Trying to be polite, but expecting (based on the aforementioned Manieschewitz and Kedem) that all Kosher wine is awful, he takes the glass, steels himself... then is pleasantly surprised that the wine is actually pretty good. Actually, beyond pretty good—it's one of the better wines he's ever had. He downs the whole bottle. His Israeli hosts are bemused, but happy it's Purim, they down a bottle too, merrily fulfilling the only holiday-related commandment they'll obey all year.
  • Also, Israelis enjoy drinking Goldstar beer (or Maccabee if you're a masochist) and Araq Ayalim (Deer Araq - Domestic, cheap, Israeli brand that has some deer drawn on the bottle). Arsim pregame for clubbing with vodka and Red Bull. Israelis who hail from the former Soviet Union love their vodka - straight, thank you very much. That being said, binge-drinking and excessive drunkenness are frowned upon by most Israelis - so a lot of bars cater to expats (especially diplomats), who have a reputation for drinking like fish.
  • As for the non-alcoholic stuff, Israelis Must Have Caffeine, so nearly every Israeli has a jones for the java. Instant coffee is widespread (commonly referred to as nescafe or just nes), but coffeehouse culture is huge in Israel. The combination of Middle Eastern coffeehouse culture with the introduction of Viennese coffeehouse culture from Central European refugees in the '30s might have something to do with that. Consequently, in big cities you will find cafes all over, and people will linger for hours, drinking black coffee with cardamom, playing shesh-besh (backgammon) or chess. Tea is also widely available, and more popular with Russian immigrants. Herbal teas are also popular. As for cold stuff - before Coca-Cola arrived in The '60s, people craving fizzy contented themselves with gazoz - fruit syrup mixed with seltzer water. It should be noted that Coca-Cola's presence in Israel created a "Coke is for Jews, Pepsi is for Arabs" stereotype that prevailed in the Middle East for over a generation (Pepsi did not move into Israel until The '90s), though today both Coke and Pepsi can be found throughout the Middle East and the stigma has faded considerably. Now a variety of Coca-Cola and Pepsi products are available, but limonana (a mint-lemon drink) is also popular, as is its variant rimonana (mint-pomegranate).
• Turkey is also exempted from the general rule of the Middle East, thanks to 90 years of government-enforced secularism. Bear in mind, however, that some Turks will insist that their country is part of Europe, thank you very much—and never mind that Iraq and Iran are just across the border! As for what they drink, the Middle East rules do apply for softer drinks, but as for alcohol:
  • The traditional drink is arak, which goes by the name of rakı in Turkey. As mentioned above is a clear grape brandy flavored with anise, and usually consumed by mixing with water; unlike some other places, sugar is not added, but a glass of plain water is sometimes taken as a chaser/side drink. Purists may drink the stuff straight. Regardless of how you take it, rakı is associated with the kinds of people who drink "traditional" drinks: old men, rustics, nationalists, and hipsters.
  • Several brands of wine can also be found, usually cheaper than but inferior to imported wine. That said, there has been some improvement of late.
  • Imported wine and liquor is available relatively cheaply, as Turkey has been in a customs union with The European Union since 1996.
  • And beer is popular with everyone. Efes is the most common brand, with several variations. Including a weird brown ale with coffee flavour that no one likes.
  • The Turkic peoples of Central Asia are just as religiously less stringent due to centuries of Imperial & Soviet Russian rule. They drink kumis like their Mongolian brethren or vodka brought by the Russians.

Other Asia

• China:
  • A member of the Communist Party of China will down several small glasses of baijiu at Party functions and while entertaining the Western, Korean, and Japanese businessmen who come to visit. The stuff tends to be stronger than Western liquor and even the finer varieties—let alone the mediocre ones provided to middle- and lower-level functionaries—have been compared in flavor to jet fuel. (All of a sudden, the Great Leap Forward makes a whole lot more sense.) Please note that the Chinese drink baijiu the way the Russians (generally) drink vodka—in small shots (a half or a quarter of standard North American shot) and with food at a social gathering. This is classically between the courses of a banquet, but less formal meals/snacks are also common.
  • At a quieter or more informal occasions, the functionary will usually drink either traditional huangjiu ("yellow wine," really a form of rice wine that ranges in color from colorless to yellow to deep purple), or a beer. If it's beer, whether it's imported or domestic depends on position in the Party. Besides the bit about position in the Party, an ordinary modern Chinese fellow will be much the same; both huangjiu and beer are common tipples for your average Chinese person, with each having its appropriate time.
  • A commonly shown brand would be Maotai for baijiu and Tsingtao for beer. It is important to note that while Tsingtao is relatively cheap, Maotai is not, usually going for over $200 per 500mL bottle—it's basically the 30-year-old single malt of Chinese liquor.
  • Chinese Nouveau Riche will purchase a rare bottle of European wine at auction for several times its expected price. He will then meet up with his buddies, who all have similarly-overpriced bottles, empty them all out into a big, silver bowl, and drink the resultant cocktail. If the wines boast particularly tannic characteristics, cola will be added. Liberally. The European sommelier brought in for some reason has a heart attack.
  • Chinese period drama has its own stereotypes:
    • A character would usually order nu'er hong (a particularly fine kind of huangjiu) if he has come into a small fortune at hand. Either that, or it's his daughter's wedding day (the tradition in many regions was to buy nu'er hong when the daughter was born, bury it, and then dig it up and drink it when she got married—hence the name, which means "daughter red").
    • Also a wealthy man would sometimes drink tiger penis wine for virility if he was getting lucky that night. Or deer penis, or elephant penis, or really any penis.
    • For a vagabond, his liquor would mostly be stored in a bottle gourd.
  • Everyone drinks Kumis in a plate when in Mongolia (be it Inner Mongolia—which is part of China—or Outer Mongolia—the current independent country).
    • That said, beer is popular in the cities, and the local beer Khan Bräu (the brewery was founded as part of a cultural exchange program with East Germany in The '80s) is a decent, if unremarkable, light, pale lager.
• A Salaryman in his native land will have sake, or perhaps an exotic foreign brew. Say, Budweiser.
  • In Real Life, though, sake has generally fallen out of fashion and beer is the drink of choice, mostly local brands like Sapporo, Kirin, Ebisu, or market-share-leader Asahi Super Dry. Most of these are of roughly equal quality to other mass-produced beers, but still better by far than the alternatives, known as "happoshu" (for low-malt content beers) or "third beer" (for non-malt beers, such as the corn-based Nodogoshi Nama). These beer-alternatives are generally beer-esque in taste, but they're attractive mainly because they're cheap, and thus much in favor among those seeking quantity over quality. ^note There is a burgeoning craft brewing industry in Japan, but it's still very much in its infancy, thanks to strict regulations that limit beer production to "macro" scale. This prevents most small start-ups from entering the market, since they can't make enough to legally 'sell' it. Still, several breweries have already produced widely-acclaimed beers: see, e.g., Kiuchi Brewery's Hitachino Nest line of beers; Kiuchi has the advantage of being a preexisting craft sake and shochu producer, so it's reasonable to assume that other breweries without that leg up will need it to catch on and gain a wider reach in order to shift broader market tastes (not to mention government regulations) in their favor. If a character was smoking and drinking, he would most likely extinguish the cigarette butt on the beer can and throw it in.
  • Or Suntory "Scotch". Makes you happy faster. Well, Suntory whisky is at least drinkable, unlike the ever-popular Old Nikka, which, ironically, nobody outside of Japan ever heard of, despite its massive following.
    • Suntory whisky is not just drinkable — in 2014, their Yamazaki Single Malt Sherry Cask 2013 variety was named the world's best in the Whisky Bible 2015, to the shock of many Westerners, particularly Scotsmen.
    • Related to Japanese whisky is the Japanese highball. While on its face it's just a whisky and soda, it is loaded with ritual. As explained by San Francisco-based bartender Nick Fisher, a true haiboru involves (1) stirring the ice in a dry room-temperature glass until it is cold, then (2) discarding the water released from the ice, then (3) adding 45 mL of whisky, then (4) stirring exactly 13 1/2 times clockwise, then (5) adding 90 mL of club soda, and finally (6) stirring exactly 3 1/2 times, again clockwise. Any other method would be incorrect. (He then goes Off the Rails and adds a lemon twist, but hey, he's in San Francisco, not Japan.)
  • Japan's true native hard liquor is shochu, which is substantially weaker than whisky. Connotations depend on era; in 1950s-1960s Japan, shochu was the drink of choice for the bohemian artistic types of the postwar generation. After that, it increasingly became identified with old men—including ex-bohemians—until a revival in the early-to-mid 2000s, when it suddenly became hip again.
    • Possibly poured into a plate instead of cup.
    • The post-war years also left another legacy regarding the consumption of shochu: since beer was hard to come by back then, but shochu wasn't, the liquor was added to a malt-flavored non-alcoholic drink called Hoppy to approximate drinking a beer. Since then, shochu and Hoppy has become something of a Japanese tradition.
  • Schoolgirls choose orange juice, from a vending machine. Or just any other kind of soft drink, "juice" being the Japanese equivalent of "soda" or "lolly-water", or indeed "coke". One might also get a nice, warm canned soup from the vending machine during those cold winter times in Japan.
  • Canned coffee is everywhere in Japan, and drunk by everyone from middle schoolers on up. (It's probably got something to do with the long hours of studying and/or work.) The ur-brand is UCC Coffee (made famous outside the country by Neon Genesis Evangelion), but Suntory Boss (with Tommy Lee Jones as its pitchman) is probably the most prevalent.
  • People looking for refreshment on a hot day are equally likely to grab a bottled green tea (or mugicha or oolong tea) as bottled water. Sweetened Western-style teas are also available in the same fashion, but are less popular.
  • Menial laborers on their way home from (or even to) work might grab a single-serving jar of cheap sake (especially One Cup Ozeki). It works its way into reports of industrial accidents and delivery truck crashes with alarming frequency.
  • If you've just done some physical exertion, you could probably do with a sports drink, which in Japan means a cloudy, colorless beverage with a taste that's not quite sweet and not quite salty. The go-to brand is Pocari Sweat, which (as the name suggests) is apparently formulated to replace what the body loses through sweating.
  • Middle-aged women and up are stereotyped as drinkers of umeshu, which is made from shōchu that's had ume fruits steeped in it (along with a fair amount of sugar). It's sweet with a bit of sourness, rounding out the bite of the shochu.
• Korean men will down soju (hard liquor distilled from rice wine or perhaps from something else—sweet potatoes are a common source) like it's water. This is aided by the fact that it is very nearly cheaper than water, and very nearly tastes like water. A drinking contest between a Chinese official and a Korean businessman is better known as a contract on both their livers.
  • Soju is a bit weaker than Western liquor (typically in the 30-35% abv range), but the quantities typically drunk, facilitated by its fairly mild flavor, make this an irrelevance. American servicemen newly stationed in South Korea often learn this the hard way, with many a gigantic soldier or Marine having to be dragged unconscious from the bar. Servicemen stationed longer, as well as their Korean comrades-in-arms, typically have a good laugh at the newbie's expense.
  • Beer in Korea, meanwhile, is almost exclusively viewed as something cheap and poor-tasting that exists solely to get fucked up on, which is largely Truth in Television due to domestic production largely consisting of two major companies who collectively hold an iron grip on the market and whose brews are of exceptionally poor quality^note Fun fact: it's so bad that Taedonggang (North Korea's main beer, produced in a state-run brewery) is widely considered to be better by a fairly large margin, while international options aren't much better in addition to being outrageously expensive. Outrageously restrictive regulations kept microbrews out of the picture until 2011, and while they have now begun to enter the market, they're still very much in their infancy and haven't done much to shake the perception that Korean beer is goat piss.
    • While alive, Kim Jong Il was known to be the single-largest purchaser of Hennessy Cognac, spending over $1 million a year on it.
• The Australian chocolate malt drink Milo is well known throughout Southeast Asia. A legend spreads that Malaysians drink the most Milo out of any nationality, including the Australians (who still love it plenty).
• Milk tea is pretty prevalent in Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore, especially "silk stocking" milk tea in Hong Kong, often paired with egg tart as a meal (typically "afternoon tea"). For teenagers it would often be soda or bubble tea, especially in Taiwan.
  • Lemon tea is also quite prevalent in Hong Kong. Older HKers may prefer yuenyeung, which is basically coffee mixed with milk tea. Both drinks can be found in cha chaan teng, and commercial versions of lemon tea do exist (the most well known being 'Vita Lemon Tea', or VLT for short).
• Indonesians usually drink sweet black tea, sometimes iced and/or flavored with jasmine, to the point that it's practically mandatory for every single eatery, either locally brewed or bottled Tehbotol brand. In coffee department they have a countless number of regional cultivars, yet in the end they're mostly served "tubruk", in which coffee grounds are mixed with hot water in the cup, although someone worth their salt usually filter the damn thing first one way or another. Also, don't forget Kopi Luwak which is basically pooped out by a palm civet. Due to the Muslim majority, alcoholic culture is not very visible there albeit the less religious stringency makes them well alive out of plain sight, but here's some rundown.
  • Most native booze starts from palm toddy, called saguer in Sulawesi and tuak in Sumatera & elsewhere, which is further distilled to insanely strong Cap Tikus (meaning "rat brand"), Arak Bali which is popular among tourists, sopi which tastes somewhat like vodka by virtue of using certain tree roots to sponge out the sweetness & aroma, among others.
  • In Java, there are ciu, a strong, clear moonshine which is not that awful made from either further fermented & distilled tape (a sweet treat made of fermented rice or cassava) or molasses/sugarcane distillate redirected from legit alcohol industry. They spawned its very own art of cocktail mixing called oplosan, in which ciu is mixed with things ranging from innocuous ones like juice or soda, other intoxicants like dextromethorpan, prescription pills, or other alcohol like cheap beer, purported tonics like energy drinks, herbs, or pinkie rats, to outright dangerous things like bugspray, methylated spirits, datura, etc. Naturally, they cause a depressing amount of deaths.
  • Also, there is a plethora of herbal wines like Congyang, the regional drink of Semarang city & Orang Tua which its company so big it also produces food, soft drinks, & hygiene products.
  • Indonesian beers like Bintang & Bali Hai is usually regarded as sub-par yet refreshing in a hot day. They are recently banned from minimarkets & small shops due to a new moral policy called the "Mental Revolution", which backfires in a surge of use of the aforementioned moonshine.
• An Indian who has money will drink imported Scotch. An Indian who wants to look like he has money, but doesn't, will drink the native "Scotch", which is really rum (being made from molasses), diluted 50-50 with water.
  • Or he will have the native Kingfisher beer, which has the same lack of quality control that the aforementioned Middle Eastern beer does.
    • Amusingly, the airline bearing the Kingfisher name and owned by the same family is actually pretty luxurious—and in absolute terms, not just compared to other Indian airlines—but unlike the beer, it loses money...it rather makes one think about their priorities.
  • An Indian trucker will have palm toddy. Hopefully after he's done driving for the day. Hopefully.
  • Younger, hipper Indians (usually in the urban areas) will have wine, domestic or foreign, if they have the money. Craft beer is also taking off, which the aforementioned young urban Indian will be proud of if it's from their area.
  • Everyone drinks tea. Everyone, regardless of class. Usually strong, made from loose leaves, with milk and a lot of sugar. Indian teastalls are enterprising men or women who have a pot boiling all day and sell it on the street in small glasses for fairly cheap.
  • Starbucks and other local chains have a small but growing slice of the market,frappes are beloved but if you want to prove you know your stuff, you don't order the sickeningly sweet syrupy stuff, you go hard core cold brew. Or espresso.
• Filipino men, especially working-class males, usually drink San Miguel Beer, failing that, its rival Beer na Beer. Others will end up drinking Red Horse beer, known for its higher than usual alcohol content. If they are not in a mood for booze, they can try gin, usually the Ginebra San Miguel brand, rum (Tanduay is the most common brand for this), or brandy, like Emperador brandy. There is also local drinks like tuba and lambanog, both made from sugarcane.
  • For those who are kids, Milo or Ovaltine is the favored drink, like the rest in Southeast Asia. While seen as a kid's drink, many adults do enjoy it. If kids especially those well-to-do want to sip chocolate while at school, there is the Magnolia Chocolait and Nestle Chuckie.
  • Fruit juices are considered for everyone, but those packaged in plastic packs like Zest-O orange juice, is still associated with schoolchildren. Then there is samalamig, associated with poorer urban Filipino children, basically juice with jellies, pandan, or coconut strips to enhance the flavor.
  • The Philippines is considered a stronghold of coffee; Nescafe is the favored brand, with local Blend 45 not far behind. Local brewers especially in Southern Luzon regions also churn up what they term 'barako' coffee, a very strong coffee and associated for being a manly coffee to sip. Then there is that civet-poo coffee (also known in Indonesia) called alamid.

Historical

• Any race of warriors who wear fur and armour (from Vikings to dwarves) will quaff beer, ale, or mead — ideally from a drinking horn, tankard, or stein.
  • Mead, we should note, is the oldest known alcoholic beverage. All you need is a container, some honey, and some water, and it'll soon turn to mead.
  • Important to note that they "quaff" their beverages. It's like drinking, only you spill more.
• Ancient Greeks and Ancient Romans generally drank wine, irrespective of social class. The wine was generally red, sweet, and concentrated to a degree that it had to be mixed with water to be drinkable. The wealthy would generally drink fine wines, which were usually minimally diluted (about a 1:1 ratio), while the lower classes drank ever-worse wines requiring greater quantities of water to become drinkable, to the point that the lowest classes often drank wine that was nearly vinegar (called posca in Roman times) mixed with water mostly as an extra precaution to make sure the water wouldn't make you sick. (While it's not true in general that pre-modern sources of water were universally unhealthy, the risk of water-borne illness was still high enough that santizing water with alcohol or vinegar was often a good idea, especially in large cities—and Rome, where posca was most popular, was at the time the largest city the world had ever seen.^note A common estimate from the height of the Empire is 1.2 million—a number that Rome itself would not reach again until 1936.)
• If you're medieval and wealthy, you'll drink red wine from a goblet. If you're not so wealthy, ale. Mead is common in fiction for all classes, but in practice was fairly expensive and reserved for special occasions. While the common myth about drinking tons of alcohol because of a lack of clean water is a myth, it's prevalent enough in fiction to still be repeated.
• Pirates will drink whatever's handy—but rum is the usual, either straight (when they can get it) or diluted 3:1 with water (called grog). Historically pirates drank a lot of punch (mixing their rum with water, citrus, and spices or even tea), but this is exceptionally rare to see in media.
  • Truth in Television: Grog was for a long time standard issue on military ships at sea because the booze made the water safer/more palatable to drink. On long sea journeys, fresh water stored in barrels or jars would usually catch off flavors at a minimum, and would frequent get contaminated somewhere along the way. In the late 18th century, the British Navy started adding lime juice to fight scurvy. These concoctions were also the forebearer of alchoholic punch drinks.
    • For an extra kick and quicker recovery in a cold climate you can make your grog not with water, but with the strong tea. This itself is a variant of hot toddy (an old Scottish cold remedy which usually calls for whisky, but any brown liquor would do in a pinch; indeed, brandy, in some opinions, actually makes for a better toddy, although you should never say this to a Scot).
• The American frontiersman will take a hard cider, or perhaps applejack (distilled or freeze-distilled cider, i.e. American apple brandy—George Washington had a prosperous distillery for it, and Alton Brown recommends that you use it instead of water for making apple pie crust^*America's Test Kitchen, on the other hand, recommends vodka; they apparently don't go in for apple-flavored crust. The point, either way, is to use hard liquor: the high alcohol content inhibits the production of gluten; gluten is bad in pie crust, as it makes the crust hard and chewy, rather than soft and flaky. Also, for those worried/hopeful, no you cannot even remotely get drunk off this kind of crust; unlike most other alcohol-containing dishes (where the alcohol only partly disappears), most or all of the relatively minimal quantities of actual alcohol should oil out of the crust, on account of the smaller quantities involved and the physics of baking being rather different from that of other cooking techniques.). That is, until about the 1810s-20s, after which he'll have whiskey instead. The hard cider would be reserved for old coots; see below.
• Tokaji wine (pronounced somewhat like "Toke-eye"), especially the sweet variety made from grapes partially raisined by noble rot, was the signature drink of the Austrian and Hungarian upper classes starting around the 17th or 18th century and anyone associating with them (for instance, Joseph Haydn, who spent most of his career in the employ of the somewhat eccentric and ludicrously wealthy Hungarian princely House of Esterházy). They evangelized for it across the courts of Europe, and found great success for it with Louis XV (who poured a glass for the Madame de Pompadour saying Vinum regum, rex vinorum ("Wine of Kings, King of Wines") and The Pope. Emperor Franz Joseph made a tradition of sending Queen Victoria one bottle of Tokaji for each month of her life on her birthday; on her last birthday (her 81st) in 1900, this amounted to 972 bottles. Tokaji remained a favorite of the nobles of the Habsburg Empire through its end in 1918, and even afterward among the descendants of the nobles to this day.
• A 19th century aesthete or decadent will have absinthe ... and find the prospect of impending madness and death terribly dull. And maybe, should they be so inclined, write a poem on the subject.
  • Absinthe is actually completely innocuous. Those clichés come from the French propaganda in the 1910s to get it forbidden in a attempt to fight alcoholism. Pastis, which immediately came to replace it, is pretty comparable (and still very popular).
  • The alternative is Laudanum - opiates mixed with wine.
    • Laudanum was primarily used as a painkiller and cough suppressant before the 20th century, so it may also be a sign that a character is dying of a terrible disease instead of decadence. Although it is entirely possible that one got the disease from decadence, so...

Universal

• Noblemen will almost certainly order a bottle of the landlord's finest wine with their meal. If they're not ordering a meal or courting someone, they'll have the finest brandy instead.
  • Unless it's an Imperial Russian nobleman we're speaking about. They preferred, of course, vodka, but not just any vodka but the artisanal kind that was made by nobles for nobles, very strong (100 to 150 proof), purified and flavored with herbs. There were a lot of traditional vodka recipes, from the sweet ladies' vodka ratafia to the extra-powerful yerofeich.
• A pimp, a rockstar, or anyone who's flaunting his massive wealth, will order 5 bottles of the most expensive champagne, whiskey or cognac in the house.
• Fans of hard rock and metal music, as well as musicians, will generally drink Jack Daniels or Jagermeister. If they're a real rock star, they'll drink it straight out of the bottle, though JD and Coke is also well regarded. These are often combined with large amounts of cigarettes. Lemmy of Motörhead was known for huge consumption of JD (he stated late in life—i.e. in his sixties—that he had had a whole bottle daily until relatively recently, at which point—again, in his sixties—he switched to a whole bottle of vodka daily "for his health"), as are Mötley Crüe (parodied on the cover of "The Dirt"). The Jägermeister is mostly because they sponsor everything.
• Mangaka or Japanese student working overnight would usually go for energy drinks which often come in a small glass capsule bottle and perhaps a sipping straw.
• Teenage or young adult delinquents will have their soft drink with some sort of alcohol mixed in for extra kick. Cuba Libre or a Screwdriver is often the popular choice, and one of the few that doesn't get one laughed at after one can legally go to a bar.^note Other such mixed drinks that can be ordered without shame by adults in a bar: whiskey and ginger ale, gin and ginger ale, cranberry juice and any clear liquor (if you're a woman or effeminate man), gin and orange or grapefruit juice (if only because of "Gin and Juice"), and whiskey and coke (especially if the whiskey is Jack Daniel's or, in Canada and certain parts of the US, Crown Royal. Also, of course, any drink mixed with plain club soda or tonic water (e.g. scotch and soda or gin and tonic), since those either leave the flavor of the alcohol alone or combine it with something just as revolting to people who haven't acquired the taste.
• A young woman (or an effeminate man) will have a martini derivative such as a Cosmopolitan, or else a margarita derivative: sweet liqueurs, comparatively high ratio of mixer to spirit, lots of sweetened garnishes, maybe an umbrella in the glass. Expect it to be pink, blue, or green.
  • One story of the origin of the Cosmopolitan is that the bartender who invented it designed it for her patrons who ordered a Martini solely so they could look sophisticated holding a cocktail glass.
• An inexperienced drinker (probably young) will take a sip of a spirit like whiskey or vodka. On taking a sip they will grimace and immediately spit it out.
• A tough guy will order something like vodka by the shot and then drink it down like water. Exclamation of enjoyment optional.
• Younger, hipper patrons are far more likely to order cocktails and mixed drinks rather than pure spirits unless they're in a group and looking to get wasted.
• Someone, usually young, with a bit of extra cash, a desire to show off and get drunk, and with little knowledge about booze, will often order Grey Goose vodka.
• The Cool Old Guy will take a Scotch or brandy (unless Southern, in which case he'll take a bourbon or rye).
• Farm labourers will order a flagon of cider.
• Middle-aged, middle-class women of the Real Simple-magazine-reading variety will get together and drink white wine. When they go out to dinner Friday night, they'll have margaritas.
• The Cloud Cuckoo Lander will have an Umbrella Drink of some kind.
• Caffeine-addicted geeks are as likely to reach for soda or energy drinks as coffee.
• Nervous types will order decaf. If someone wants to mess with such a person, they'll switch the decaf for caffeinated, and Hilarity Ensues. A semi-subversion of the trope is the reverse situation, in which a hard-driving personality type or group of same has their extreme caffeine replaced with decaf. As Dilbert's Wally gasps among the fallen (asleep) bodies of his co-workers: "Must... find... antidote..."
  • Note: hilarity may not ensue in real life, so don't try this at home.
• Recovering alcoholics will have club soda.
  • Or Schweppes' Bitter Lemon.
  • Or coffee, simply substituting one drug for another.
• Geeks are always ready to Do the Dew. Real geeks still have half a case of Jolt Cola. Half a case, because the original stuff is impossible to find nowadays. "Proper" Jolt Cola (i.e. the stuff that children of the 80s drank in high school) is dead, but the brand still exists, only retooled as an energy drink. Has been seen at some gas stations, convenience stores and other random places. Can be ordered here.
  • Many geeks stocked up when Pepsi Throwback or Mountain Dew Throwback hit the stores. Both of these are made with sugar, instead of high fructose corn syrup. Should Mexican Coca-Cola (also made with sugar) be available in that part of the US, add that to the shopping list as well. Now the throwbacks are now available permanently in the US.
  • Mountain Dew is only intermittently available in the UK, so fans will stock up when it does hit the stores (or when they visit America) because it doesn't tend to be available for very long.
  • The all-night-gaming/LAN-Party favorite soda is usually Mountain Dew (either the original radioactive yellow-green variety or whatever limited-time-only flavor is available this month), though Bawls Energy Drink is also popular.
  • In Germany, while geeks may have Mountain Dew, energy drink or coffee, those who identify as hackers will always be seen with at least one bottle of Club-Mate, a yerba mate based soft drink (always from the bottle, though not because of convention, but merely that it tastes rather bad in a glass). This goes so far that the relatively small brewery producing it always has delivery difficulties whenever there's a major hacking convention. Recently it has fallen into fashion with ordinary university students though and is being offered by a few national store chains, as well as in the back pages of 2600, a long-running hacker quarterly magazine. For an alcoholic drink, the hacker will have a Tschunk (rum, limes and cane sugar, topped up with Club-Mate of course).
• Two types of characters order milk: total pansies and stone-cold badasses. The common gag is when some ornery local mistakes the latter for the former due to his drink order, tries to pick a fight, and Hilarity Ensues. The former has been largely overtaken by the latter in fiction; just look at all the milk-drinking badasses further down the page.
• If a character identifies as a Juggalo (or Jugalette), expect him/her to drink Faygo.
• For modern gunman type characters, three drinks are favored. One aligned with the west will go for beer. One aligned with the east will go for vodka. For the toughest of the tough, however, tea is the drink of choice. No alcohol to cloud the system, complex flavors, and contains both a stimulant and a tranquilizer, putting a true stone cold badass in a zen spot to dole out carnage. Interestingly enough, lots of actual fighters don't trust people who don't drink, one of the prime reasons being that because most soldiers, paramilitaries, and peacekeepers are young men and drinking is a key part of bonding for that demographic, teetotalers are seen as standoffish and weird.

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