Many of us are stuck at home, eyeing our half-emptied bottle of rum and a can of Coke and wishing we could be out and about on a Friday night. Don't despair: It's not as difficult as you might think to make yourself a delicious drink! You just have to understand the basic science of crafting cocktails, which is called mixology.

I remember being 8 years old and sneaking a sip of my uncle's can of Budweiser beer he usually kept in our refrigerator when he came to visit.

If you’d have told fresh-faced, eighteen year-old me that at twenty-two I would be writing an article for public consumption under this headline, I would have laughed in your face and taken a big swig of my G&T at such a ludicrous suggestion. And yet, here I am, having felt inclined to put pen to paper on this subject for months, the reasons leading up to which I will discuss below.

5 Reasons My First Attempt at Quitting Drinking Failed

While living my best life I attended Eden’s 30th birthday. The event was at Mosman Hotel in a small outside room upstairs. It was a hot Stormy day, the kind of weather that sets the mood, that promises drama and excitement. It’s the kind of weather that lacklustre cinematographers use to tell the story when they lack the artistic ability to convey a nuanced mood. But yeah, it was promising weather for a promising night. I was ready to get wrecked and the weather had my back. I generally have a pretty solid tolerance for alcohol. I would back myself in a drinking competition against anyone but the most hardened of alcoholic miners. Tonight, I was going to test the tensile strength of my liver and I was going to have a blast doing it. I was enjoying myself catching up with my old Uni crew. It had been three months since we were all together, the last time was Charles 30th. It was the year of 30th birthdays, the year of everyone saying goodbye to their twenties and most of them stepping up to the ‘I’m an adult for real and proper now’. Obviously, I didn’t do any stepping up, but the people around me were starting to make those life choices. I had polished off my 3 bottles of white wine and decided to switch to vodka, as you do in the second hour of drinking. I decided to be a reformed former smoker for the night as well because it seemed like a good idea at the time. By this stage I was visibly drunk, but there is never any stopping Dionysus. Dionysus doesn’t want your speed zones, Dionysus doesn’t see your stop signs, Dionysus wants to have fun, and fun happens at pedal to the metal. The thing that stopped me, my metaphorical wall if you will, was a cigarette. After smoke bombing myself for hours, it was a cigarette that tipped me over the edge. The room started to spin uncontrollably. It had been a while since I had drunk that much and smoke bombed myself that hard, and the consequences of my day hit me all at once. Like Sally Pearson, my system just gave up on me, lay down and cried, but unlike an Olympic rowing team there was no-one left to row row row my boat to shore. Like introverts everywhere I decided to do the dodgy bail, to sneak away and order an uber and hope no-one noticed. To my surprise as I exited the pub there was 4 taxis already lined up. I tried to order an uber through my phone app because it’s cheaper than a taxi but I was by this stage incapable of using my phone. It’s entirely possible I was trying to order my Uber on the back screen of my phone or maybe even on a shoe like a funky modern version of get smart. The point being it wasn’t working. I decided to take a taxi because, while expensive, it was within my current capabilities and I wanted to get home. We got about 2 kms in the taxi before I started to feel violently sick. As politely as possibly when incoherently intoxicated, I asked the driver to pull over so I could throw up. He pulled over, and I opened the door just in time to throw up. I threw up so violently that I briefly lost consciousness and came to, face down in a pile of vomit in the gutter. Half in and half out of the taxi, I languished there like an uncoordinated flamingo. I had hit my head on the gutter, torn my ear at some point, and was covered in a foul-smelling wash of blood, vomit and shame.

Before we begin, I think it is important to mention that these stories are only true to the best of my knowledge. I was drunk, a lot, and I solemnly swear that these are depicted as I remember them. But memory is cousin to truth, not twin, and in this case mutated, undesired lusus naturae.

Captain Morgan is a name known far and wide, but today the only fear it generates is in people who can't quite remember what they did after their eighth shot of rum on Saturday night. However, unlike some products that come up with catchy names and memorable mascots to go with them, Captain Morgan was a real person. Beyond simply existing though, Captain Henry Morgan wrote his name in gunpowder and blood all throughout the Caribbean in the 1600s.

Wine is a drink best served happy.

Among the pleasures of men in the world, whiskey is one of the things that need to be mentioned first. It is the wine that is easy to enjoy, but the more you delve into it, the more you discover these interesting things that have become the favorite drink of many great people and successful business people. The reason whiskey is so attractive to men is because the story of whiskey itself contains a lot of lessons about maturity, how to enjoy them, there are many things that are sophisticated and not less careful turmeric.