The Secret Reason We Say Cheers Before Drinking

The Somm Effect

While some might disagree, I personally believe that it’s always better to enjoy some drinks with friends around. Whether at a huge party or just to kick back and hang out, it’s always easier to tell stories and joke about with a drink in hand and good people in the room.

Many of you have experienced the wonderful act of cheers-ing your loved ones right before taking a sip or shot of whatever’s in your glass. On that note, have you ever wondered why we say cheers and clink our glasses before drinking? It all relates to stimulating our 5 senses.

Let me explain:

Sight

We’ll start off with sight as this is almost always the first of our 5 senses to be stimulated. Before a bottle of any liquor, ale, wine etc. falls into our possession, we obviously use our eyes to inspect what it is we are getting.

When browsing through a supermarket or liquor store for our preferred spirit of choice, we look through bottles upon bottles before finding what we need. Once that’s dealt with, our eyes are (usually) diverted to the bottle’s price tag.

If you ended up bringing a bottle home, you’ll get another glimpse of it when you try to crack it open. Upon getting a glass, you’ll watch as the liquor beautifully flows into it when you pour yourself a drink.

Now that you’re good to go, for the remainder of your drinking session, your glass will always be in sight – therefore the eyes are always stimulated when you drink.

Touch

Does this section even require an explanation? You grab the bottle (or bottles) you want then crack the seal with your hands. Following this, you’d grab a glass – or several if company’s around, then tilt the bottle to pour the alcohol out.

For those who prefer their drinks chilled, you’d grab some ice cubes to place in your glass and once your drink is prepared, you’ll raise it close towards your mouth to stimulate the next sense:

Smell

Before you’ve managed to take your first sip, you’d already be hit by the aroma wafting off your drink the moment you crack that bottle open. As you pour it out into your glass, the liquor’s scent becomes all the more noticeable.

Connoisseurs usually have a quick whiff of their drink to get a sense of the different ingredients found in their alcohol before drinking it. Some say that these aromas have the ability to evoke special memories associated to said aroma.

For the casual drinker, a liquor’s aroma might not carry any relevance to them. Even so, the smell of the liquor you drink will always linger as you sip and even after you’ve finished the last drop.

Taste

Similar to the touch section of this article, this one’s a no-brainer. You’re drinking alcohol, of course your sense of taste will be stimulated!

How else would you enjoy some drinks without… well, drinking. Some enjoy their drinks neat while others prefer it on the rocks. There’s also people who enjoy drinking with some sort of mixer to go with their liquor (which isn’t a crime no matter what ‘experienced’ drinkers say).

The point is that if you are planning to drink, it’s almost guaranteed that you will taste whatever it is you’re drinking to some extent. On that note, we’ve covered 4 of the 5 senses we have… so what’s left?

Hearing

Close your eyes and picture yourself filling up a glass of your favourite drink. Let’s say you enjoy your drink chilled, so you grab some ice cubes and drop them into your glass – what do you hear first?

The clink of ice cubes falling into the glass. Now that you’re iced up it’s time to pour the liquor out. As it pours, you’ll hear your glass filling up followed by the swish of the liquor in its bottle as you set it upright again. Doing that alone would already evoke a sense of excitement.

Finally, to commemorate the start (or end) of an enjoyable drinking session, we yell out ‘Cheers!‘ then clink our glasses together so that our ears aren’t left out, and thus – all 5 senses are stimulated.