My parents let me have a glass of sparkling wine every once in while, starting when I was around 12, I think. Hard to put a number on it.

Beer. Beer with a head on it.

When I was a kid we could have tastes of our parents beer. I vividly remember the smell and the gas going up my nose.

Having good draft beer with a head on it brings back that memory.

Vodka with orange juice, in high school. My parents never gave me sips of alcohol.

Mad Dog 20/20. It’s the only thing underage kids could get their hands on. I don’t recommend it.

Dear soon-to-be-21,

Don’t think you have to try everything the first night. Pick a drink and stick to it. I suggest something palatable to the uninitiated (like say a margarita vs. a martini).

Take it slow and don’t think being “backcrap wasted” is fun. It’s not, and the aftermath is awful.

Beer. Before you take this drinking safari, eat first and have a glass of milk with the meal. And pace yourself while imbibing! Stay away from the sweet drinks. (I like vodka and tonic.) Don’t overdo it. Leaning over a toilet bowl with your nose in the water, puking your GUTS out, dry-heaving like there’s no tomorrow, is no fun!

Hopefully you realize sooner rather than later that being wasted is not really that much fun. It can be, but it can also not be, and each time may be different (in other words, it’s not a guarantee of a great time).

When I was in a bar for the first time, age 16, looking 18 which was the drinking age at the time, I had no idea what to order so I ordered what Tony Manero (John Travolta’s character) ordered in Saturday Night Fever: a 7&7. That’s 7-Up and Seagram’s 7. I still drink it to this day, only at parties which, with my job, will be about 6 to 8 times a year. Other than that, at family gatherings I may have wine. I am just as likely to have Diet Coke or Coke Zero (which is caffeine free diet) because I’m really not a drinker. I love it when my cousin drinks mucho wine but then will lecture me about how awful diet soda is for you when she sees me with my one glass of Diet Coke.

My advice to you is to be very careful drinking more than one type of drink on the same night. Don’t drink a White Russian and then switch to a Margarita. Trust me, when I was young, been there, done that, no bueno.

Drinking is really not all that it’s cracked up to be. Right now, if you offered me an alcoholic drink or Coke Zero, I’ll pick the Coke Zero (which is what I’m drinking, as we speak). I have alcohol in my house forever and never touch it.

Red wine, quite a lot of red wine.
I was around 12 on holiday in Paris & we went on a wine tasting trip.
Cheese & crackers with wine, it tasted like fruit juice to me & so I drank loads of the stuff.

My first was a slo gin fizz, and I hated it. I never did like it in the future. A friend’s father served me a homemade strawberry daiquiri. It was very good. The strawberries were fresh. I have always hated beer. It tastes spoiled, and it makes me feel bloated. Very dry sparkling wine, or daiquiris is my go to mostly. I never have been much of a drinker. At first I thought I should not answer your question because of that, but then I thought, maybe you are not much of a drinker either, and just don’t know it yet. If you find you don’t enjoy it, don’t feel pressured, just don’t drink. I don’t miss years of not getting drunk.
Enjoy your birthday, whatever flavor it ends up being.

I suggest you stay away from Tequila. That can be pretty rough if you’re not used to but great if you are. I’d suggest trying a beer but is you don’t like it, something simple like a 7&7 would do nicely. As a guy that spent a good part of of my life drunk, I’ll second that comment about being wasted is not the best way to go through life.

Sometimes my father would make my brother and I a small shandy when he was having a glass of beer, we loved it.

Colt 45 malt liquor. I was 18.

My dad found out about it when he noticed that I had barfed in his car.

I was 17.5 and spending the summer with a family in Burgundy. I was served watered red wine at lunchtime and gorgeous vintage wine with every evening meal. They owned a small but renowned vineyard. I was inexperienced and had no idea of the quality of the stuff I was quaffing.

Homemade wine. I was at a “party” at a friends house and she brought our a bottle of some red wine her family made and it was PDG!

pdg= Pig DisGusting?

@ragingloli Pretty Damn Good! ;D

My parents would occasionally let me have wine with dinner from a young age, probably around 12, as others have described. There was no “OMG I CAN DRINK NOW” moment, it was just an ordinary once in a while beverage.

I stole a bottle of wine from my parents when I was 12. But I wouldn’t recommend wine the first time.

Try something with a little bit of a kick that has been mixed well to taste good but lets you know you are drinking alcohol. A margarita, a mojito, maybe a rum and coke or maybe a mai tai.

Apart from a sip of advocaat or sherry at Christmas (which I found disgusting!), my first real alcohol drinking experience was with cider. I think it was Strongbow. We were about 13 and got completely tanked on it. I’ve never drunk cider again. Just the thought turns my stomach.

When I was like three or something, my parents had a party with friends, and in the morning I found a bunch of beer bottles and drank all the bottoms that was left in them. My mom found me passed out in the hallway. Obviously I have absolutely no recollection of this, but she swears it was true, and my dad told me this as well.

For all intents and purposes though, the first drink I remember having was beer, but that was just a sip. The first time I got real nice and wasted was with beer as well. Second time was vodka, and I got sick as all hell. Went in my bed, then I puked on the floor. Rolled off the bed later, right into the puke. Talk about wallowing in your own filth. Worse is, I made absolutely no effort to get back into bed, I just said, fuck it, goin back to sleep. Woke up later because I had to take a massive shit. By then the puke was half dried up, so when I got up my shirt and hair made this gross ass sound as it was freeing itself from the vomit. Fuckin like, some weird ripping suction sound. It sucked.

Some God-awful mixture of alcohols, from gin to whiskey and who knows what inbetween, from my parent’s liquor cabinet, mixed in with orange juice. Talk about a screwed driver! We mixed it all in a jar. Ended up drinking about half of it, and then throwing the jar in the creek. It was nasty.

A Grasshopper in Las Vegas with my parents. I don’t remember if they put alcohol in it or not.

My parents never gave me alcohol.

Soon after Rick and I got together we were out at the lake at some sort of barbque. My son was with us. He was 15 at the time. Rick’s friend tried to pressure me into letting my son drink beer. He said, “The first time they get drunk should be with their parents.”
I was like, “WTF is wrong with you??”
Of course, I didn’t give in and to this day my son drinks very, very little. Can’t imagine how different that might be if I was the kind of parent who said, “Let’s get drunk together!”
What was wrong with that guy? Who, BTW, is a drunk and totally estranged from his kids. We haven’t associated with him for about a decade now, ever since he shoved me and got in my face at a birthday party he and his wife had for him. He was drunk.

Whoops! Just read the details! My answer ^^^ doesn’t apply. You’re going to be 21, which is a far cry from 15!

When I was in CPS, I had a client tell me her dad used to take her to the river and drink with her, when she was a teen. How dysfunctional is that?

@Dutchess_III 21 may be a far cry from 15 for most, but given that the OP says in his details “He’s gonna be the designated driver because im gonna get backcrap wasted,just saying”, the maturity level is apparently the same.

If the point of having the first drink is to “get backcrap wasted” (so nice to learn a charming new phrase), my advice to the OP is to get the cheapest thing possible. Don’t waste anything good on it.

Boones Farm!

@pittfan20: Four days ago you told us; “I have suffered from various Mental Health issues like:PTSD, ADHD, OCD, Bipolar Depression, Obesity, Schitzophrenia(sic), and Schizto-Effective Dissorder (sic).” Source

Perhaps getting “backcrap wasted” might not be the happiest way of celebrating your 21st birthday.

Are you aware that alcohol of any type is basically a depressant?

If not, you should be.

Plus it’s a proven fact that alcohol kills brain cells.

Have a good time ~~

^ “Are you aware that alcohol of any type is basically a depressant?”

How so, could you explain or link a source? I’d be interested to learn more!

@longgone The phrase “alcohol is a depressant” has been around since long before the word “depression” became primarily used as a clinical diagnosis for a mood disorder or mental illness. It doesn’t mean “alcohol will make you depressed” or “alcohol will give you depression”.

However, alcohol and depression (in the sense that @gailcalled used it) are a bad combination.

@longgone: If you google alcohol and depressant, you will find that it’s a CNS (Central Nervous System) depressant. That means it slows your breathing, etc. If the OP is on medication for his/her various mental issues, that may not be a good thing to drink and take meds at the same time, yet stopping medication is not recommended. Given the choice between medication and alcohol, the OP needs medication (if he/she takes it) more than getting wasted.

Beer

There are any number of now dead celebrities (and others with more money than common sense) for whom this knowledge is posthumous unfortunately.

Do the names Heath Ledger or Whitney Houston (Xanax + alcohol) ring a bell here? And that’s just two among many.

Alcohol has a tremendous potentiating effect on practically any substance which affects the central nervous system. So, by drinking and taking any one of various (EVEN legally) prescribed medications, can be someone unknowingly sealing their death sentence.

Potentiation means that alcohol plus certain medications can have a synergistic effect upon each other so that rather than 1+1=2 you can end up with 1+1=3 or greater in terms of total effect. And that’s how accidental overdoses kill people.

Even though medications prone to being problematic in this fashion are CLEARLY labeled as such, many people ignore these warning labels with impunity.

Just because nothing horrible happened the first time they were combined with alcohol or even the fifth, tenth, or thirtieth , is absolutely no guarantee that the 31st time will not be fatal.

I’m willing to lay odds that at least one of his medications contains a printed warning label against combining with alcohol.

@gailcalled , good catch. I was unaware of the previous mention.
Please do not drink if you are taking any kind of prescription meds. There are so many ways to celebrate becoming 21. Don’t endanger yourself or others. Even if you are not on meds, it would not be wise. Please have fun safely.
Happy birthday!

@Buttonstc, @jca, @dappled_leaves

Thank you for the clarifying :]

Homemade red wine.

My little, old, Italian landlord use to make it from the grapes he grew in our yard. He would give me sips from small glasses when I was, maybe ten.

Later, when I was about twelve, my father would let me sip his beer on occasion.

I did a little “party drinking” in high school, but by the time I turned twenty-one, I just didn’t care. The novelty has worn off. There was no mystery about alcohol and I had no desire to “get wasted”.

I didn’t even go out drinking for my twenty-first birthday.

Probably red wine at a Sunday dinner. My parents drank a lot, so alcohol was never a mystery to me.