Bioshock > Provision > Alcohol
There are alcoholic beverages scattered throughout Rapture, esp. in the bars and taverns. Drinking a bottle of alcohol adds to your health but takes away from your Eve. If you drink more than one bottle of alcohol, you will experience the blurred vision and loss of balance that comes from being blotto.
Later in the game (starting in Fort Frolic) the gene tonic Booze Hound becomes available. Booze Hound lets you gain Eve instead of losing it; but it still does not stop you from getting drunk. You can create it by crafting it in a U-Invent vendor. You need five items of glue, four enzyme samples and three empty hypos; but these can be lowered by special tonics or by hacking the crafting machine.
| Drink | Label |
|---|---|
| absinthe | Moonbeam |
| beer | Old Harbinger |
| cognac | Red Ribbon |
| gin | Fine |
| scotch | Lacas |
| vodka | Chechnya |
| whiskey | Old Tar/Old Tom |
| wine | Arcadia Merlot |
Moonbeam Absinthe is Sander Cohen's favorite drink; you will find it only in his hideouts. This is appropos to Cohen: Absinthe was the favorite drink of artists and bohemians, as it is said to make one both lucid and ebriated. It also had an undeserved reputation for being poisonous. Cohen no doubt brought Moonbeam Absinthe with him to Rapture: There was no way to smuggle it in from the States, where the drink was banned. But, alas, it no longer matters: Adam ensured that absinthe could no longer make Cohen either lucid or drunk.
Red Ribbon Cognac is very rare. It is found in only three places: On the television set in Anna Culpepper's apartment; on the floor in the study of Sander Cohen's flat, evidently stolen as a trophy; and in Bridgette Tennenbaum's apartment, apparently left behind by the guys who pillaged it.
Fine Gin is also a luxury in Rapture. The most prominent location of the gin is on the corpse of Jasmine Jolene in Fort Frolic.
The name Chechnya for a vodka is an anomaly: The Chechens were Muslims and never drank vodka; and until 1956 were not even in Chechnya, as Stalin exiled them to Siberia for interfering with the fight on the Eastern Front. On the other hand Ryan has no love for Stalin, whose agents murdered his family, so it is possible the vodka was named by Ryan in honor of his co-victims.
Early on in the game's development the whiskey was to be called Old Tar. For some reason the name was changed to Old Tom. Thus the whiskey is Old Tom in the captions, but Old Tar on the labels and poster ads.
Old Tar
means an old sailor, and the figure on the bottle is a boxer, implying a tough fighter. Old Tom
is a fruit-sweetened gin, not a whiskey. Something went awry somewhere in the development process.
The same kind of label disparity can also be found on the scotch (caption = Lacas, label = Lacan, after the French psychiatrist, perhaps?) and the wine (caption = Arcadia, label = Fountainhead, a definitely Randian reference).
Arcadia Wine is just as potent as any other Rapture hootch, which is a surprise given that it is deluded with distilled water. It is just as well: The corrupt vintner would have spiked it with antifreeze à la The Simpsons if he had gotten hold of some. Speaking of him, a sign of available wines in his Winery include:
If you look closely at the Arcadia wine bottles, they are marked as Cabarnet Sauvignon under the label Fountainhead. This, as I noted above, is an obvious reference to Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead.
There is beer you can drive, Old Harbinger. But there are also signs in the Fighting McDonagh tavern, in the Fleet Hall concession area and in other drink emporia for 123 Beer, Ryan Club Ale and Tennessee 111 Horse Ale. And the Molotovs that the nitro splicers throw use bottles of Rose Old Lager beer, now filled with something more potent.
If you are not the drinking type, you can use alcohol as a weapon. Use Incinerate to set the bottle on fire; then use Telekinesis to throw the new Molotov at your target. The flames are more powerful then a Nitro's Molotov, esp. when you have equipped yourself with the gene tonic Human Inferno. Be careful, though. Some brews, like Lacas Scotch, are blinding and hard to aim, so aim before you light and throw.