I remember very well my first experience drinking alcohol. I was a teenager and it was myself and two friends, sitting in a dark church yard, passing a bottle of Boone's Farm Tickle Pink between us. I remember we all thought it tasted awful, but that didn't stop any of us from drinking it. At some point, I discovered that my dad's bourbon mixed with cola tasted much better and gave up on the Tickle Pink.

I do like beer now, but it took me years to acquire a taste for it. Maybe that peculiar beer taste has something to do with the fact that new research shows that binge-drinking teens prefer liquor over beer. That, and the fact that underage drinkers find liquor easier to acquire - my dad had plenty of the hard stuff in the liquor cabinet and so did my friend's parents.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) analyzed responses to 4,000 anonymous surveys completed by public high school teens in Arkansas, Nebraska, New Mexico and Wyoming. What they found was that liquor was the drink of choice for binge drinkers in all but Nebraska, where it tied with beer. A binge drinker was defined as someone who had five or more alcoholic drinks on at least one occasion in the last 30 days.

Jennifer Cremeens, a former CDC epidemiologist, says besides being easier to pilfer than beer, liquor is also easier to conceal. And it gets the job done faster. "Liquor's quicker," she said.

The study was published in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.