Ongoing Musing

Why is it that different (types of alcohol was what I was going to put, but it's all I suppose basically the same alcohol) alcoholic drinks have different effects?
To clarify, I mean essentially the effects at the time of drinking. (I'd guess there may be different effects later: I'm not the one to investigate that set of effects since I'm almost hangover proof.) The sort of variables I'm thinking about are:

• speed of effect: how long it takes before the first "hit"
  
• magnitude of effect: a notional scale from almost nothing through merry to stocious
  
• type of effect: for instance, falls asleep.
  
  I'm always surprised at the immense difference between, say, drinking beer or wine. Why, I don't know. I've accepted for years that I get high very rapidly on coffee (real; instant just makes me cross), but drink huge quantities of tea (I mean huge: the tea mug ought to be welded to one hand), very strong, with no apparent effect. Both have caffeine in them, but the effects are different. Since I drink my tea so strong (and black) that it looks like coffee, I'm getting more caffeine than I would from coffee. But it doesn't pack the same punch.
  Still, this was all prompted by the glass of absinthe (cheap Czech (Cheap Czech Absinthe: band name, song time or album title?)) I drank last night, prompted, no doubt, by the pictures of green dregs in the bottoms of glasses in one of the scenes from the very interesting programme on Picasso on BBC4.
  For the investigative record:
  Effects of absinthe, cheap Czech, one large glass, over even larger quantities of ice:
  
  
  
  • speed wise, almost imperceptibly slow
    
  • mentally produces great clarity of thought
    
  • physically relaxing, but not warming (no "glow")
    
  • emotionally distancing
    
  • don't seem to have drunk alcohol at all, so obviously not drunk.
    
  
  I know absinthe's a bad example. It's got wormwood in it. So I'm really mixing my poisons. But its effects are remarkably different from beer and reasonably close to whisky.
  Also last night, I discovered I'm beginning to find the mere smell of sherry almost unbearable. (Smell, now that's a whole other investigative can of worms....