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[dirty foot]

Drinking from a well is actually faster, probably because dwarves want to get it over with as quickly as possible.

Non [ALCOHOL_DEPENDENT] races will drink booze and only booze as long as it is available.

Here's a megaproject for dealing with the time loss from booze drinking and the slow work from not having booze at the same time:

Make a burrow encompassing the entire fortress save for a designated drinking zone. Make another burrow containing the designated drinking zone. Add all dwarves to the fortress burrow. The fortress burrow does not contain any booze, only some wells. The drinking zone contains a booze storage area and breweries. Dwarves only start to work slowly after a while and you can actually check whether the lack of booze is starting to have an effect on them by looking at their thoughts (according to the wiki). When the lack of booze does cause a problem, add them to the drinking burrow so the next time they get thirsty, they will drink alcohol. Then remove them from the drinking burrow.

That's a fantastic idea!

[CaptainArchmage]

That's a fantastic idea!

If you want to do burrow designation quickly, go to the top of the map, define the burrow starting from one corner of the map. Then scroll to the bottom and finish the selection at the opposite corner of the map. This burrow then covers the entire map. Name it.

Then remove the brewery zone from the burrow. Define another burrow in this zone, and name it. Dwarves can be assigned to more than one burrow.

Obviously, some dwarves will have to be assigned to the brewery from time to time for production and hauling, but if you get an absolutely massive stockpile, you won't have people assigned frequently, and the stockpiles won't be depleted as fast.

EDIT: You should define the bookkeeper's office in a completely separate burrow, since bookkeepers tend to haul off booze to drink while doing their job, and this barrel might then get passed around among the population if the bookkeeper gets his alcohol shot during record-updating time.

EDIT2: According to the wiki, no booze may cause insanity. To test this out, mod in a position appointed by the player to succeed the Baron or Count or Duke, and leave the Baron or Count or Duke without booze permanently. Make sure they are kept happy (this ensures that insanity is not from other causes, and the dining hall and masterpiece adamantine well made out of artifact adamantine parts should be sufficient). See if they go insane after a few years.

[Miuramir]

As for your questions: I'm in a pretty temperate environment; not too hot, not too cold. I know it's that they're individually drinking for too long (in my opinion) and not different people always there. I was watching my super soldier very closely for nearly a year in game time, and he would stop and drink forever before I made him a flask. While watching him, I noticed some other notable people that never left either. I think they just spend way too much time drinking. I don't know why they're coded to spend this much time.

There's two sets of things going into all this.  On the one hand, it sounds like you may have some logistics issues, most frequently with not enough available barrels and made worse by crowding.  When a dwarf wants to drink, they path to an available barrel with booze; as I understand it, this barrel will then be considered "pending use" until they get there, drink from it (generally described as "upend barrel over mouth, chug until you've had a month's worth" as no tools or containers are yet used), put it down, and the game gets around to marking it as available again.  In a crowded stockpile, dwarves may be constantly re-pathing around other dwarves or dropping to half speed ("crawling") to fit past each other, which may make the problem considerably worse.  Additionally, barrels are not usable from when they get marked as pending transit from brewery to stockpile until when they arrive and are marked available.  In some cases, thirsty dwarves nearer the brewery may claim recently-produced barrels of booze still in the brewery, which causes more dwarf congestion between drinkers, haulers, and brewers and prevents them being properly cleared out to reduce brewery clutter. 

Some efficiency suggestions: Have your main booze stockpile be thin rather than just a square; one of the best arrangements is to have it be a square or few deep all around the edges of your dining area, so dwarves will naturally path to different parts of it without congestion.  Have more barrels of booze than you think you need, and then some more than that; for smaller forts where efficiency is important having your main drinking stockpile with perhaps 20% more available barrels full of booze than you have dwarves is a good idea, with supplemental stockpiles near outlying areas (forges, farms, etc.) where dwarves spend a lot of time to decrease both pathing and travel time.  Make sure the stockpiles are closer than the actual breweries to where your dwarves generally are and you have some spare haulers, to prevent congestion at the production source.  Consider marking some high-traffic marked paths to optimize pathing near and in the stockpiles, and some low-traffic marked paths just outside the brewery to keep dwarves who don't have business there from getting in the way. 

Looking at the other direction, "a dwarf will drink booze an average of four times per season", so that's 16 times a year, or about 23 days per.  Consider how much time a typical late-medieval through pre-industrial working man would spend at a tavern; remember than in many societies, beer (etc.) was providing a significant fraction of your daily calorie intake, especially over the winter.  (Some have argued that organized fermentation as both a food energy storage system and a reason to settle down was both an enabling and defining characteristic of what we think of as town-based civilization.)  1-2 hours per day, 6 days a week would not have been considered unusual at all in many settings, and could easily be closer to double that in some; given the way DF abstracts things out, that reasonably means that an ordinary dwarf will spend one to two days drinking a bit more often than once a month *if everything is fully efficient*; with long travel times, crowded stockpiles or dining areas, and particularly shortage of barrels dragging things out even longer.  And this is a reasonable *historical* value given DF's weirdly pseudo-abstracted time system; fantasy dwarves are often depicted as even *more* booze-oriented than realistic historical folk.  Note for instance that IIRC the DF dwarven liver is twice the volume of a human; that pretty strongly implies that they might be drinking twice as much...

[Bogeyman]

In the latest version food stockpiles seem to be broken, they haul an empty barrel there and that's it.

[dirty foot]

As for your questions: I'm in a pretty temperate environment; not too hot, not too cold. I know it's that they're individually drinking for too long (in my opinion) and not different people always there. I was watching my super soldier very closely for nearly a year in game time, and he would stop and drink forever before I made him a flask. While watching him, I noticed some other notable people that never left either. I think they just spend way too much time drinking. I don't know why they're coded to spend this much time.

<Lots of advice>

Thank you for taking the time to help me out with this. I guess my big gripe was really only associated with how inefficient they were in total when trying to drink. I never thought about how my square or barrels was slowing people down while moving. I forget people have to crawl to get around each other sometimes. I think I need to make more than one drinking hole. I have a four square wide hallway through my main portion of the fort, and people still slow down when walking through there too.

[Mekboy]

Drinking time should be lower. Much lower. It's a drink, not a 6 course meal with a 30 minute trained monkey show.

This.

As it stands, dwarves take HOURS to drink anything.  True, they haven't had anything to drink for several days or months in DF's timescale, but it takes no time at all to wash up or fill a waterskin, yet hours to drink liquor.

It's obvious why they take so long, isn't it? They're dwarves, so they don't drink, they quaff, which is like drinking but you spill most of it.

[Humaan]

You don't know? Dwarves always have alcohol stored up in their cheeks. In order to keep this supply up, every few days they drink some alcohol to refill these stores. When they are "thirsty", this supply is getting dangerously low. This is also why they slow down with water, because as the water stays in their cheeks, it loses its flavor, making dwarves reget having to drink this terrible product.

[Jeoshua]

I always figured that the gigantic Dwarven liver metabolized alcohol into some kind of vitamin they can't get any other way.  Hence when they slow down from lack of alcohol, they're actually suffering from a vitamin deficiency.

[Zesty]

I should have clarified my statement. I call it the brewery, but it really is just two stills with a drink stockpile between them in the dining hall. I've made it as efficient as possible, but they just feel perfectly fine with standing there for what seems an eternity.

You're complaining because your dwarves are hanging out in your meeting area?

[dirty foot]

I should have clarified my statement. I call it the brewery, but it really is just two stills with a drink stockpile between them in the dining hall. I've made it as efficient as possible, but they just feel perfectly fine with standing there for what seems an eternity.

You're complaining because your dwarves are hanging out in your meeting area?

I'm complaining because they're not doing their jobs in favor of sitting around at the bar for hours on end. My dwarfs that were working near the wells got much, much more work done than any working on the side near the meeting hall. It's because when they're thirsty, they would just walk over to the well, spend three seconds drinking, then get their butts right back to work.

Dwarfs with beer, on the other hand, would head over for a drink...then stay there until they got hungry or wanted to go to bed.

[ricemastah]

Dwarfs with beer, on the other hand, would head over for a drink...then stay there until they got hungry or wanted to go to bed.

I have NEVER seen this. EVER. I do have multiple food stockpiles at important locations throughout my fortresses though. They all have booze, which is as it should be

[Jeoshua]

This sheds new light on our investigation into your Elfiness, Mr Booze Hater.

The Dwarves are hanging out near your stills because you have set it as a meeting area.  Dwarves without jobs will stay in meeting areas.  The dwarves in question, do they have jobs assigned? Do you have hauling jobs that they could be doing?

Your lack of faith disturbs me.

[Chessrook44]

I just make the fort and pay no attention to how the dwarves feel.

Never had a single tantrum or bout of insanity in seven dwarf years of the fort.

Only time I worried was when a child died or got kidnapped, or I had to starve four useless dwarves, two of which were married with kids.  Nothing happened.

I have a good successful fort, I think.

[freeze]

I'm totally okay with them carrying waterskins full of booze. It may or may not in fact provide more efficiency for the drinking process, I couldn't say. But not rations. I didn't build that dining room for nothing, dammit.

[Deon]

Dwarfs with beer, on the other hand, would head over for a drink...then stay there until they got hungry or wanted to go to bed.

I have NEVER seen this. EVER. I do have multiple food stockpiles at important locations throughout my fortresses though. They all have booze, which is as it should be

Huh, same.

Are you sure that is not a meeting area? That would explain that behaviour, and not the booze.

Dwarves who didn't have a drink start to work much slower, so I wouldn't recommend it if you can help it.

Doesn't explain why wells are so instantaneous.

Only if there's the water right under the well. If there are a few Z levels, the bucket will go down and up for a REALLY long period of time. Always try to build your wells on top of a water .