I’m not huge on green-tinted beer or white ethnic pride, but history has proven that St. Patrick came down on the right side of both snakes and day-drinking, which is reason enough to duck out of work at noon today to celebrate his birth-or-whatever. This year there’ll be the supplemental attraction of the first full…

Hey, bud, want a burrito? For real. I appreciate you: For the way you talk, the way you walk, the way you’re statistically unlikely to be the shrieky dude who lives upstairs. But mostly for the way you click. Damn, you click so good. So I would like to give you a burrito. Or more specifically, I would like to transfer…

Life, being pain, will sometimes trap even the most careful fast-foodie in the burgerless hellscape of a bullshit “real” restaurant that offers six total options: beef, chicken, this kind of fish, that kind of fish, some mushroom-pasta thing, and a wild card that is probably duck or beans. The meat-hunk choices seem…

I’ve never been to New Orleans and don’t know nearly as much as I should about its culture, but I do know Mardi Gras is upon us, and I know that’s good news. Again, not entirely certain what this festival entails—I gather it’s some kind of voodoo St. Patrick’s Day with better-looking celebrants and more elaborate…

American consumption of full-calorie soft drinks has been dropping for years now, as we’ve shown rare nutritional good judgment in demonizing soda as liquefied diabetes that makes you burp your rotted teeth out on the way to your long-overdue early grave.

Cheese trails only corgis and dead British men as a stimulator of exaggerated public devotion. Forgetting for a blessed second the “lactose intolerant” cowards who try to hide dime-store haterism behind their genetics and intestines, we all stand ever ready to declare undying love for good old thickened milk.

Any of you happy bastards still clinging to the Sober January charade? Me neither, thank goodness, but I do always try to dial the booze back a bit during the darkest stretch of winter. I figure it’s impossible to truly enjoy life during this accursed half-season, so why sully liquor’s good name by associating it too…

Drinking is expensive! Or at least it is if you do it with any kind of style and dedication. If your lone goal is to get loaded while spending as little as possible, then you’re probably in peril, but also in luck. The rise of the boozy alco-pop (Four Loko and the like) means there’s never been a better time to drink…

Tex-Mex food is increasingly popular in the United States for a number of very good reasons: It caters to our changing demographics, it advances our national agenda of all getting as fat as possible, and it’s relatively simple to execute on a large scale. In fact, it’s so hard to truly ruin a burrito that Chipotle had…

Winter beer is a slippery category that used to comprise slightly boozy ales brewed with spices and odd grains, but has long since metastasized to include not only those traditional “winter warmers,” but also just about any damn thing a brewery’s marketing department feels like hanging a snowflake on. This can be…

There are currently more breweries than at any time in American history, which is cool enough, but what’s even better is the gargantuan number of beers they combine to produce. Long gone are the whatever-old days when a brewery could get by offering just a few different styles. For more than a century, a domestic…

All holidays are the best, but Thanksgiving is the extra-best, because it doesn’t offend anyone other than the killjoys who are put off by naked gluttony. There’s no religious component to fake, work around, or disagree with; the weather isn’t quite horrific yet in most parts of the country; and if you’re in the right…

Dweezil Zappa’s dad memorably declared that a country’s legitimacy is predicated upon its having its own airline and its own beer, and maybe a football team and a nuclear arsenal for good measure. With all due respect to the groovy and departed, I’d like to suggest that in this more enlightened age, we replace…

Americans drink more vodka than any other spirit, although whiskey has been gaining ground in recent years. Despite—eh, who are we kidding, because of—its mass appeal, vodka is disdained by most cocktail snobs, which is reason enough to celebrate its continued prominence. But vodka has uses far beyond simply riling up…

If you came of drinking age in a certain era, Guinness Draught was quite likely the first good beer you ever had. As recently as a decade ago, it was common to walk into a middle-of-the-road American bar and be confronted with a tap list featuring Shit, Shit Light, Shit Ice, Lemon-Lime Shit, Cider Shit If You’re…

Little kids can be cool, but there are a lot of obvious arguments against parenthood. Children are demonstrably shouty, snotty, and wobbly, and they are rumored to be very expensive to maintain. It has also been widely reported that children have poor taste in television. These are among the reasons I am not currently…

After cleaning the ceiling fans on Monday and ordering new sweatpants yesterday, just a single item remains on my 2015 to-do list, and I don’t think I’m going to get around to it. I really figured this was going to be the year I finally learned how to brew my own beer, but a lack of space and gumption—combined with a…

Beer festivals have a lot going for them, what with brewski and festivity right there in the very name. What’s better than brushing your teeth (please?), strapping on your second-cleanest jeans, and stepping out to try dozens of new beers with hundreds of likeminded humans? Hell, a lot of beer fests even have taco…

Booze and leisure bloggers have no need for calendars, but we do require many of the same ointments, detergents, and jerkies that bring the rest of you into Walgreen’s on a regular basis. That trip is also how I know that Halloween hasn’t passed yet: The salted-pomegranate candy corn has yet to give way to next…

Gin is the best white spirit, and its reward for this distinction is an unfounded but excellent reputation for spookiness and danger. Long before Reddit’s baddest boyz started taking pictures of “shower beer” balanced precariously atop their guts, the true freedom fighters of the 1920s battled Prohibition with…