Epic WTF

You kids with your actual ciders and perry. I remember when round here you could only get Strongbow or Woodpecker.

White Lightning or Special Red.
🤢

Coming from the West Country our first pub that would serve underaged sold rough scrumpy (some horrible cloudy affair) for 90p per pint - 11 pints for a tenner (not that any of us managed that).

You think you've hit rock bottom with white lightning but then you discover white ace and carbon white.

11 pints for a tenner

Winner!

The magical 10 pints...

Reminded of bottle of castaway alcoholic drink and bottle of special k being mixed in a pint glass.... Why it just gave you a terrible hangover...

Castaway was a white white spritzer? Or some terrible mix

Thatchers?

A blastaway.

If memory serves me (probably not) even Weston's scrumpy used to be £5 for 2l in Asda. And that was probably considered quite 'posh' in that subset of alcoholic drinks.

Ha ha, you know.

Yep Weston's was the 'fancy' cider, strongbow was just standard for £2.50 for 3 liters and then the white xyz were pure tramp juice fare. I remember a 500ml can was regularly cheaper than a 330ml can of coke, round about 40p

Our local off license did draught sherry. Take a milk bottle that had been left on the step for a pint. I've been so ill with it.
Pint of mixed was always mild and bitter.

Now we’re on to terrible ciders, I owe a lot of my worst freshers year hangover experiences to Frosty Jack, the connoisseur’s choice of plastic bottled white ciders. We did centurions with it a few times in the corridor which went about as well as could be expected.

My old local had 'Ditch' a cider made by a local farmer that was unadvertised and only sold with a lemonade top. It was so cloudy it was almost opaque and often still had bits of apple floating. you could strip the paint off a car door with it, even topped off with lemonade

Day 1 at uni, went round the off licence with a calculator, working out what was the best value way to achieve oblivion (volume/price/ABV). The winner was Old Country cider - 6%, I think £2.20 for a 3 litre bottle, to be drunk in full before going to the pub/Union, most nights of the week.

Absolute rotgut, but spent 3 years trolleyed on it and haven't touched cider since the day I graduated. Even the smell still gives me the boke.

In my day it was a few Special Brew/Merrydown snakebites or a can of Tennent's Super topped off with a Captain Morgan miniature and a spliff. Welcome to ToyTown. 😵

Jfc, only done a few spesh/K snakebites ever and they were the most savage hangovers of my life

Wonder if it was real sherry, or stuff like British fortified wine like QC. Does make any difference but the idea of sherry on draught makes me smile for some reason.

@ASTTer Wondering if all the bottled ciders such as white lightening etc are much of a muchness.

@HelicopterHelicopter Now that is what I would say was proper scrumpy cider. Or am I misguided?

@kl Admire the dedication. The difference between student and street drinker is a calculator.

Did none of you try brewing your own beer or wine from kits?

Did none of you try brewing your own beer or wine from kits?

Yeah of course. Got through gallons of those schnapps kits from Boots. Party punch was a kitchen bin from Staines Essentials filled with a couple of litres of homebrew schnapps, couple of bottles of cheap wine and filled to the top with cheap juice from Stainesburys or Egham Scumerfield 😀

I could never taste the difference between any of them, for some reason we just took to the frosty Jack brand. I’m sure there’s a module for a marketing course in there somewhere.

Now you’ve moved the conversation onto fortified wine that opens up a whole new raft of memories. We tried mulling Buckfast one Christmas, which was surprisingly pleasant…

Uni poker nights, one chap would always come round to ours with a litre of home made ethanol. He'd mix it with Tizer to take the edge off. Anybody asking for a glass would be warned about the risk of blindness in case he'd got it wrong and made methanol.

Different times

Buckfast seemed to have a revival recently (or at least it did in some of my friend groups). I thought I'd happily left it behind as a University drink but people started to bring it to house parties and using it for cocktails over the last couple of years. Or Sanatogen if they fancied a cheaper off brand night. They all seem to have moved on to Magnum now though which tastes even worse I think.

Similarly a friend has started to big up Dragon Soop for some reason despite it being, again from University memory, an absolutely horrific drink.

Sounds very like my friendship group. I'd say from about 26 to 32 we would start the night off with a bottle of Buckfast 'ironically'. I swore off it after waking up at about 4pm with heart palpitations and realising it would probably kill me.

I only experienced Dragon Soop once, and that was when a friend went back to uni at 28 to do a medicine degree and we descended on his halls and generally terrified his clean living fresher housemates with our rowdy ways. I blame coming of age at peak alcohol...

MD2020 …..was it actually called Mad Dog and an similar one in a sherry like bottle but tasted like a herby white wine