In no particular order, Tesco's wine, Jagermeister, Southern Comfort, Bundaberg rum and Retsina spring painfully to mind.

I tried this turps flavoured brew once. Was just gobsmacked that the ancient Greeks could neck this lethal stuff whilst creating modern civilization at the same time

.. with a bottle of Aldi whisky, the cheapest they had. It was a time of severe financial hardship for me that coincided with an emotional nadir, a surefire recipe for drinking what amounted to drain cleaner (I believe it cost less than a fiver - not exactly Linkwood 1973 standard).

The results were predictable, disabling and painful, things really only could get better.

would be the one for me.Almost raw alcohol.One sniffter,never again.Must admit though no where near as unpleasant an experience as sniffing Dry cleaning fluid while out of it on Magic Mushrooms.No wonder my heads so Fu*ked up.

than Pernod?

I was about 17 or 18, going to see a band with my mates in a pub about eight miles away.

In a VERY rash move I decided to try a depth charge - a double whisky in a shot glass dropped to the bottom of a pint of strong cider. This was after a couple of pints of beer.

Cue driving the porcelain bus for the rest of the evening, missing the band and my good friends "forgetting" to bundle me into the taxi.

The walk home sobred me up though.

Still don't drink cider or whisky to this day.

Hungarian herbal liquer that tastes like plant medicine is an unforgettable drink. Nice bottle though.

A ciggy had to be smoked with every swig to cope.

Those were the days my friends.

It's an Icelandic form of schnapps and is also known as "black death." It's about 35% proof. I'd purchased a cheapo bottle whilst on a trip there and put it away for show but, a few years later in an, 'I fancy a drink but there's nothing else in the house' moment, I tried it. It was so ghastly I had to have another shot. This confirmed that I should tip it down the loo (where it seemed to function in a similar way to bleach) and on just 2 shots I still awoke the next day with a headache. Deadly stuff!

particularly the blue label version. There was also a "wine" that was similar but more alcoholic called "Night Train Express". Two bottles of that and you were on the fast train to hell.
Anybody remember the stronger version of Red Stripe called Crucial Brew? Two cans of that and a herbal cigarette did the trick

My Gran came back from a Trans European old folks' coach trip in the 90s with a bottle of 'whisky' which had apparently originated in Latvia. After spending several years maturing under the sink at my parents' place my brother and I finally cracked it open one Boxing Day - it tasted like a blend of industrial alcohol and treacle. Of course we drank it anyway - the hangover that followed, a kind of parched delerium attended by anxiety attacks, was the worst I've ever endured.

Go and see Latvia, it's beautiful, but avoid their whisky.

i'm on the wagon.Weddings and funerals are the exceptions but in the old days it was.
1) Night train express. A lost day in Memphis,thanks for the reminder Mr Topaz.
2) Holsten Pils, i went to a gig (The Ant Hill Mob,rockabilly band with female singer,They were brilliant)at Bognor College. In the Pub Holsten was 1,25 a bottle,in the college 20p. We bought 4 cases.
3) Beaujolis Nouveau 1991. Was working in a pub and the landlord moaned at me for not drinking. I then started on pints of the stuff. woke up next morning in bed with landlord's daughter and the hangover from hell and sans a job.
4)Becherovka- from my hometown in Czech republic.A jagermeister style concoction. You can drink it with tonic. This is called beton. In Czech it means Concrete.
5)Tuborg Gold, Vodka and Russchian. Gillingham away with the Mighty Bognor Regis Town. Both the team and my head suffered.

the 'purple pint' - a snakebite and black with a double pernod in - was a popular route to oblivion and/or a quick fumble on the compost heap in the graveyard of the village church.

Later a flatmate invented the altogether worse (excuse my french) "C*ntshake", which was a snakebite of Tennents Super and White Lightning (both 9% and essentially petrochemical), which was then upgraded to the "F*cking C*ntshake" by being topped up with £2 a bottle Bulgarian red wine. I don't think we were nice people to be around in those days.

Eight of them in quick succession. Being a bitter drinker, I couldn't quite get my head around the fact that you could drink a small volume of drink to have the same effect. Drank the aftershocks (which from memory were flourescent orange) followed by a huge cigar (never smoked in my life) and washed it down with a couple of pints of Hobgoblin. The following morning it suddenly dawned on me why they were called 'Aftershocks'. I was proper poorly and was kicked out of the house by the good lady while she cleaned up 'the mess'.
I have limited my drinking ever since.

As teenagers we used to have Buckfast races where contestants would try and down a bottle in one. The only time I ever attempted this, I vomited after only the second gulp. This has never happened to me before or since. That night, I swear I went from sober to hungover without an intervening period of actual drunkenness inbetween. Horrible experience, horrible stuff.

Spent drinking B-52s* with the local Finance Director and some merchant bankers.

We finished at around 4am.

Ouch. Never again.

I understand that the bankers - who were on an early flight back to the USA the following morning - were refused boarding and (being still drunk and obstreperous) were consequently detained by the emigration services for some hours.

*A triple-layered cocktail comprising Tia Maria, Baileys and Grand Marnier.

The worst tasting beverage ever to send my head spinning into a low orbit around Saturn was brought back from Kenya, in an Evian mineral water bottle, by a Catholic priest.

In the kitchen of our hall of residence, at the University of Reading, Deelon unscrewed the plastic cap. Immediately the room was flooded with the overpowering smell of ethanol. He poured three small measures into some glasses that he had retrieved from the sink.

Being in close proximity to the fumes was making me feel ill. I raised the glass to my lips and swallowed the contents in a single gulp. A split second later every organ in my body imitated the jarring grind of a botched gear change. My throat felt like it was on fire. For 30 tortured seconds I could hardly breathe and thought that I was going to suffocate. It was another half minute before I recovered the mental capacity to form sentences.

“Jesus Christ! What’s in it?”

Deelon, who often began the day by downing a six pack, beamed at me from across the table:

“Fermented pork.”

I still don’t know if he was joking.

Try it! No, actually don't.

First drunken party with a bottle of QC sherry. Or QB, in tribute to Monty Python. "I can't say the letter C. What a silly bunt"

A friend's concoction was Nitro. In an empty plastic Vimto bottle with the word NITRO scrawled on the label with a marker pen. Whatever came to hand - draught sherry, whisky, etc from cheap off licence. Mixed together and drunk rapidly.

Pretty much the only thing our Student Bar would serve if you needed a bottle to take to a party, various flavours, the lime one was a florescent pale green, god knows what it used to do to our insides, possibly a good thing that you could only keep it down for about 15 mins..

A stout. *shudder*.

I learned several things that night, but mainly the thing I learned was "if I think it is not OK, but all the rest of my pals are saying it is fine, I should trust my instinct"

We were all 17ish, old enough to be served in some pubs and off-licences. We were at a party where the host had been making home-brew with his dad. The stout was 'nearly ready'. Oh no it wasn't. We were all ill, some of us for days afterwards.

Despite some grim hangovers, there is nothing that I have drunk that I couldn't drink again.

I prefer Ricard to Pernod - it tastes exactly like my favourite liquorice allsorts

but I have friends who can't be in the same room as Pernod (or gin, or whisky, your miles may vary)

The horrorshow drink from University was The Green Bastard - a pint of Lowenbrau with a large Blue Bols dropped in it. For English drinkers, that counts as a treble measure because this was a 2 quarter gills. Two pints of Green Bastard would set you up for a night out. It looked like a pint of Fairy Liquid.

Colt 45 malt liquour. I took solace in a four-pack one night when Oldham knocked Southampton out of the league cup. And was sick. A lot.

Italian 100% lab-grade ethanol. It is used, apparently, to make fruit infusions like limoncello. I was persuaded to try a shot of it neat. It went down in one, and came back in one as well.

Neither of said beverages have passed my lips since. In either direction.

It's Flemish, it has an extraordinarily high alcohol content, it's sweet and a bit sickly. I used to live in Lille and the landlord of my local bar would challenge anyone who boasted about their drinking prowess to finish off 5 of them, in which case they were on the house. I didn't manage it and in 14 months, I never saw anyone else succeed.

I recall (hazily) an occasion when our Ops Director descended on us because 2 bigwigs from London Head Office were visiting. He'd heard stories about the 'Duvel challenge' and foolishly took it on after a meal and a few bevvies elsewhere. I watched as he and 3 of my fellow ex-pat colleagues got so plastered that they could barely walk home. In fact, 2 of them failed to turn up the following day, 1 did but threw up and was left in an unused office to sleep it off and the Ops Director - who realised he had to be there because the bigwigs were expecting him - had to disappear twice from the meeting to be ill.

We took the bigwigs to a very nice lunch (the main reason for their arrival, methinks) and of course, they fancies a few glasses of wine. I took a sadistic delight in plying the Ops Director with more booze and watching as he turned a really awful colour. He claimed to the bigwigs that he was victim to the same flu that had kept the other ex-pats away that day...

...goes to some home brewed (yes, brewed) gin we made in uni, from a kit. It's was black, because we didn't wait for the clarifying charcoal to settle properly. It made half of us go mental and the other half lose the will to go on.

First prize goes to a bottle of sambucca. Foul, foul shit. I don't care if it's flammable, it's like drinking the stuff from inside a Glade Plugin.

Basically a double Bailey's with lime juice, which made the cream congeal. The experience was not unlike drinking phlegm. They also made the "Kangaroo" which was pink, had lager, pernod, babycham and something else. Made for a good base prior to an evening's excess...

Personal reasons prevent me from even smelling Southern Comfort ever again. Or barley "wine" for that matter

Good call nicktf. Never quite understood barley wine. It looked and tasted just like Special Brew, but condensed into mini bottles - the bottle link surely being it's only connection to classifying as "wine"

While at Poly a friend returned from the Easter holidays with several bottles of Poteen - distilled by his uncle in a caravan somewhere outside Derry.
We drank the lot in one sitting.
It tasted of Evil and caused mental mayhem.

... the Blastaway - Diamond White mixed with a bottle of Castaway (a sort of alcoholic Lilt which, alas, seems to be no longer available).

As a teenager I was also quite partial to the occasional Turbo Shandy - a pint glass filled with a bottle of Stella, topped up with the alcopop of your choice. The classic mixer was Smirnoff Ice, but I always preferred to add blue WKD, which gives the drink an attractive green-ish tinge and a faint, not unpleasant, aftertaste of bubblegum.

Where some wag would invent a drink for the evening, usually involving a mixture of barley wine, guinness, bitter and whatever else would fit into a pint glass.

Names such as a Berlin Wall, because it had a cherry on top on a piece of barbed wire. Cricket Bat, because your mother would use one to break your sheets in the morning.

A drink we put together in New York years ago, named after the band we were in at the time which was named after the Tom Waits record. Get a pint glass, put in a shot of Tequila, a shot of Vodka, a shot of Jack Daniels, a shot of gin and a shot of Brandy, fill to the top with ice and orange juice. Drink. Repeat once or twice. Collapse on the floor.

the drink that pretty well made me re-assess my life.

The Peckham Nosedive.

Half cornershop vodka, half Original Chesty Benylin.

Lives up to its name.

After a Co-op works night when I was 17, I will not touch Southern Comfort again...even the smell of it turns my stomach

Awful, it tastes like watered down chocolate milk

... about getting so ill on a particular drink that you can never touch it again. He plans to quit booze by spending the rest of life getting sick on one drink at a time, saying he'll be 80 years old with nothing left to drink and being forced to swill down Creme De Cocoa

Drinks promotion, Hulme Hall bar, Manchester University 1991. Cue Shot-related fun and brief nickname of "Mr Creosote" thanks to a fortunately placed metal bin. Was carried back to my mate's house by two blokes called Graham and placed on the sofa to die. Said mate then destroyed the kitchen furniture and when his drop dead gorgeous flatmate wandered in to make breakfast the next morning and saw me sprawled on the chaise longue all previous flirtatiousness ceased. Had to crawl up the stairs to de-chunk a couple of times and retreated home later that afternoon if not scarred for life then certainly badly bruised.

More cider, came in a 3 litre bottle.

Never been able to enjoy cider since.

Never indulged myself, but met a fella today I knew at school many years ago and he has clearly suffered the ravages of the Buckie/ Bennie cocktail that was his drink of choice for a number of years.
I did however spend an evening on Bacardi and milk in a Puerto Rican bar in New Jersey with a then work colleague which left a three day slew of despair I have banished from the memory from that dreadful day in 1992 until now.
Also, stay away from Asda own brand Irish whiskey at all costs and never, ever, ever, make a party punch (in a bucket) of Aldi own brand vodka, gin, vermouth, cava and orange juice. And definitely don't allow someone else to pour a half bottle of tequila into it when you aren't looking.

nothing exotic I know but on my 21st birthday (not a recent eveny by any stretch of the imagination) was celebrated with Allbright bitter and sweet martini. Not a combination I would recommend. Even to this day the smell or even the thought of sweet martini makes me retch...sorry. have to run..................

Pan-Galactic Gargleblaster

Sweet Martini.