Growing up LDS (aka Mormon),  I was instilled with a set of rules practically from the time I was old enough to toothlessly gnaw on the Scriptures. Swearing? Bad. Smoking? Bad. Unmarried sex? Next to murder[1].Smoking and drinking alcohol? May as well just be struck dead right then and there.

Well, maybe not that drastic. Just eternal damnation (or what passes for "damnation" in the Mormon faith, anyway). 

This never really was a problem for me anyway. The only time I had imbibed was when I was about six, and my Uncle Pat[2] gave me a sip of his beer. To my refined six year old palette, this was pretty much the nastiest stuff I had ever considered tasting. Worse than kissing a girl (hey, I was six!).

Growing up in Vancouver, WA, most of my time was filled with  LDS activities (Boy Scouts, church duties, etc) or sports or just trying to earn money to waste on dates. (Well, my dad thought it was a waste. I thought alone time with a girl was the greatest thing ever, even if it meant I was going to Mormon Hell for touching a girl's breast in the backseat of my old Volkswagen Beetle.)

Even after I left home for college, I had no interest to drink. Even during my decade as "atheist in the closet", the idea of drinking was so foreign, I never bothered to start. Which, I later found out, made me very popular among my coworker. Usually a travel session went like this:

Server: And what will you be drinking?

Me: I'll have a water, thanks.

Coworker1: Wait a second - John's here!

Coworker2: Yeah - John's a Mormon. I'll have 2 beers! John's the designated driver!

Coworker1: Yay John! I'll have the rum and coke!

It got to the point, whenever we'd travel, it was assumed that I'd get the rental car. I think I heard at some point when I switched jobs nobody bothered to get one, and they were stuck at the airport for an hour trying to figure out why there wasn't a reservation waiting for them.

Even after I officially left the LDS church and came out of the atheist closet, I still didn't drink. I had no reason to. And even if I did, there was still my lovely wife to think of. She stayed in the church, and I wasn't going to start drinking coffee and smoking and drinking around her and the kids anyway.

My project to visit 52 different religions in a year actually helped cement my goal of never  drinking. At the Jewish Reform synagogue Beth Israel I attended a Saturday Shabbat service. After, the congregation moved to the back dining area for some snacks. Little pieces of bread and thimblefuls of grape juice lay on the table.

Mmmm - grape juice. I love grape juice. I pressed a little cup to my lips. "Not yet!" an elderly lady in a New York accent scolded me with a smile. "Wait until the blessing!"

"Oh - sorry." I waited as the rabbi came out, spoke some words of Hebrew, and ended his prayer with "L'Chaim!" The congregation rose their little cups. "L'Chaim!" They echoed.

"Le heim!" I said, and tossed back my drink. Waiting for that sweet tartness of the grape on my tongue.

Instead, it was the taste of death incarnate. Of grapes that hadn't been plucked in their prime, but tortured off the vine, water boarded into confession by Jack Bauer on a very bad day. It was the taste of suffering.

Later, I discovered this was Concord Grape wine, rated to be possibly the worst wine possible to drink. "It's an acquired flavor," the rabbi informed me later.

That only cemented by status as a "non-drinker." As I walked to my New Beetle (what can I say - I have a thing for cars that look like fat babies with big eyes) I called my lovely wife. "Honey," I said to her. "Do you still love me?"

"What did you do this time?" she asked, her voice wary.

"You know how I promised I wouldn't turn into a drinker just because I'm no longer Mormon?"

"Yessss," she drawled.

"Well, looks like I'm about to drink and drive after attending the Reform service here."

"Oh, really. What was it?"

"A thimbleful of liquid nastiness."

"Oh." I could hear her shrug over the line. "Well, I'm sure you'll be fine."

Then I turned 36. And started to wonder - just what did it taste like to drink a full drink? I mean, so many people since the world over since human civilization practically began[3]- it must taste good or something? Maybe it was time I try something. My wife and kids were going out of town to visit my parents while I stayed and worked, and I was going to hang out with some friends. Maybe I'd try something. It's not like I was hiding it from my wife - I told her what I was going to do.

The problem was: what to have as a first real full drink?

"Whatever you do," half of my friends counseled, "Don't have a beer as your first drink. It's going to taste awful. Try a nice wine instead."

The other half of my friends had other advice. "No! You're going to hate wine until you get used to it! Just try a good beer. Like a Bud Light."

Well, that didn't settle anything. I started reaching out to total strangers, even putting a post up on Reddit asking what a good first drink was.

Finally, I decided on trying a cranberry vodka. I like cranberry juice. And vodka looks sort of like water. So while I was out with some friends (ironically, after a wine tasting event that I didn't participate in - I had the ice cream), we were all seated in the restaurant. After dinner, we were going to see the latest Harry Potter movie, so I figured I'd have about 3.5 hours to let the alcohol drain from my system before so I wouldn't kill someone driving home while "under the influence" of one drink.

I made my order, and while I had a perfect mask of excitement on, there was still that part of me, shouting from the back of my mind. "Sinner! Evil person!"  My baptism was now consdiered null-and-void. Officially, via the Mormon church, I was no longer "really" married (my temple marriage now invalidated - I was only married until I died instead of "for time and all eternity").

Yet, that part of me that had been grounded in since birth still told me how bad I was for even considering having this drink.

I told it to shut the frack up and drank. 

The experience was both anti-climatic and pivotal. The earth didn't open to swallow me up, I didn't see demonic angels dancing and laughing at me approaching this fallen state, I didn't have a vision of a sad looking Donny Osmond and Glenn Beck giving disappointed looks.

It was just cranberry with too much vodka for a short glass. It tasted - OK. Not great, not like I wanted to go try another one, just - OK.

My friends all toasted and celebrated my first drink. I kept an eye on my own mind. When would I feel the effects? Would I turn into a mean drunk? A sad drunk? 

I tapped my fingers against each other, an old trick from band days to keep time.  I could detect a the barest hint of a slowdown between my senses and my fingers. Just enough that if I was going to play some Doom or Unreal Tournament, I'd feel those few milliseconds slip by. The muscles in my neck loosened.

But otherwise - I felt fine. I didn't turn into a weeping idiot or a paranoid delusional freak[4]. I ate my meal, saw Harry Potter fight the forces of evil (hey - that little brat's been drinking Butterbeers since he was 14!), and went home to call my wife in California.

"So how was it?" she asked.

"Meh."

And that pretty much described it. If not "meh", then "blech!" At the advice of an Irish-American friend of mine who felt that True Men drank Guinness, I decided to give the famous brew a try.

This was when I discovered I was cursed by the Alcohol Gods:

It just went downhill from there. At a Conservative Bat Mitvah event, I was invited to the back office to drink a scotch with the others. "Don't drink it straight down," my friend Michael advised. "Roll it around your tongue first, then drink it."

I rolled. My lips puckered as I swished the amber fluid over my tongue. When I finally decided I was done "appreciating" the flavor that contorted my face into a two year old's being introduced to brussel sprouts, I swallowed. It was like swallowing Listerine. Something I had never considered, and now knew why the warning label said never to do it.

Michael noticed the look on my face. "It's an aquired taste," he said by way of apology.

An aquired taste. Something I had heard about wine, beer, scotch, whiskey, pretty much every drink with a shred of alcohol. Every week or so, while out with friends, I'd try one drink, and get burned every time. The White Russian variant at a pub in Seattle called a Lebowskiwas made of a vodka that burned terribly. The mojito at a restaurant was judged by my brother-in-law as being terrible even to his "acquired taste" palate. "They used bitter mint leaves," he said.

I just made no sense to me. If drinking didn't taste good, why did anyone do it? Just because everybody else did? Was Nancy Reagan right all along, and all it took was for people to "just say no" and nobody would smoke/drink/do drugs/dance the macerina.

Months later, I was sitting in a bar, waiting for an Asatru (Norse neo-pagan religion). The bartender came by and asked me what to drink.

"Look," I explained. "I never started a drink until 3 months ago, and so far, everything I've tried had been pretty gross.  What do you recommend?"

I looked at me for a few seconds, then without a word, vanished to the wall. He pulled down two glasses, pulled some levers. In one glass he poured a fingers width high amount of gold fluid. In the other was a red fizzy liquid.

"Try these," he said. I sampled the gold one first. Not bad- a little tart.  The red drink, though - 

Flavor rolled across my tongue. The fizz tickled my nose,  brought the smells right into my brain. And it was good. Tart and sweet and bubbly, the taste of raspberries filling my senses. Whatever alcohol I tasted was so faint, it was just another flavor.

"It's a lambic beer," he explained. "Called a framboise - made with raspberries."

"I'll take one of these," I said. And while I waited for a contact who never showed, I sipped at my raspberry beer, ate toasted bread with herbed goat cheese.

No guilt. No worry. Just - flavor and the simple pleasure of good food.

It's not that I want to become a drinker. Odds are, I never will. I've still never been drunk, and honestly the idea scares me a bit.

But I have options now. I don't feel like I'm going to be blasted to atoms by an angry god who hates liquer, or that I'm going to turn into a raging drunk just because I want to try something. I can have the beer - or not. Or try a wine - or not.

Odds are I won't like most of what I sample. But at least I can try. Now, just what is this appletini thing I keep hearing about....