Beyond Good and Alcohol

Alcoholic drinks do not agree with me. A single glass of wine 

or beer is amply sufficient to turn life into a valley of tears.

 

Nietzsche didn't just despise the moral narcotic of Christianity; he also hated alcohol and often wrote of the negative effect that booze has on the character.

Thus, although he'd enjoyed a drink or two in his student days, Nietzsche was pretty much a teetotaler all his adult life and insisted that for free spirits, such as himself, a refreshing drink of water was enough (or, on special occasions, maybe a small glass of milk). 

 

Alcohol, he insisted, dulled intellectual and emotional intensity and those who consume it - like the beer-swilling Germans - do so at their peril; they wilfully make themselves stupid as well as obese.      

 

Having said that, it's hard to imagine Nietzsche lending his support to the temperance movement of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, which is clearly a form of finger-wagging puritanism that coincided with Christian revivalism and women's suffrage (something else that Nietzsche was not a fan of).

Thankfully, Nietzsche is liberal enough to call for individual decision making on the basis of personal need, rather than a general prohibition on the production, sale, and consumption of alcohol; for this saves him from falling into fanaticism on the subject.