| Does drinking less expensive alcohol really make you feel worse? I always heard cheap booze gives you a worse hangover. Kelly, Los Angeles, California This is one of those bits of conventional wisdom that gets repeated so often it's accepted as a fact. I have to confess I also believed it until I hunted down the truth. A few years back, on a tour of tequila distilleries in Tequila, Mexico, our guide told me that cheaper liquors are less filtered and therefore make you feel worse when you drink them. This seemed to explain a lot about my twenties, so I bought a bottle of the expensive stuff to throw in my suitcase and repeated this useful insight frequently.
Turns out, the existing research can only tell us so much. Though there are studies that look at the general impact of ethanol — AKA drinking alcohol — on our bodies, there hasn't been a lot of investigation into the effect of specific ingredients and methodologies.
One expert I reached out to, David Nutt at Imperial College of London, partly answered my hangover questions using common sense. "People will drink more cheap alcohol as it's cheap," he says. "People rarely get drunk on a $200 bottle of Claret." Hangovers are generally a sign that we have overdone it on the drinking — and it's primarily a reaction to the alcohol itself. The more you drink, the worse the hangover will be. The exception, he says, is booze that's so cheap it contains other things generally removed during the distilling process. Compounds and byproducts of fermenting booze known as congeners, such as acetaldehydes, methanol and tannins, also worsen hangovers, according to Laura Veach, a clinical addiction specialist and professor at Wake Forest University School of Medicine. "Hangover research indicates the more congeners in the intoxicating drink, the more likely the hangover," she says. "At least two studies show more severe hangover symptoms occur when drinking darker liquors, such as bourbon whiskey, with very high congener content." Generally speaking, alcohol becomes lighter in color the more it's filtered. There are exceptions, but that means it contains fewer congeners, she says. "Many specialists agree that cheaper alcohol brands often use less effective filtering, allowing more of those troubling byproducts into the alcoholic beverage, thus increasing the risk of those unwanted hangovers," says Veach. So my Tequila tour guide wasn't totally off-base. But more hangover-related research is needed to provide a perfect answer, she says.
So sadly even the pricey booze will give you a headache if you drink too much. And the only reliable cure is time. — Kristen V. Brown | 
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