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This scenario involved rework and content enhancement for an article that was several years old and too short to comply with Google's preferred minimum length. 

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Original Version

Anyone who's ever taken a shot of hard liquor can tell you: it burns on the way down. But it's not the alcohol itself that's burning your throat. Instead, the ethanol in the liquid is making your throat's VR1 heat receptors more sensitive, prompting them to perceive your own body temperature as hot. (Of course, this doesn't mean you should do shot after shot without fear of consequences.) Learn more about the science of alcohol with the videos below.
 
Why Does Alcohol Burn When You Drink It?
Don’t blame it on the a-a-a-a-a-alcohol.
 
1.     Alcohol triggers the VR1 heat receptor in your mouth and throat
2.     2. Ethanol and capsaicin both bind to the VR1 receptors in your mouth, but ethanol merely makes them more sensitive
3.     Ethanol lowers the activation threshold of your VR1 receptors, which means that your own body causes a burning sensation

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Content Enhanced Version

Burn, Baby, Burn!  Why Do Shots of Tequila Burn Your Throat? [Title Change]

​If you have ever taken a shot of hard liquor, you know how badly it burns on the way down. But how can a room temperature or even a cool liquid cause this burning sensation? The answer is not what you might expect.

How a Normal Body Protects You

As is well known, your body’s normal temperature is at, or very close to, 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit (37 degrees Celsius). When you drink a cold beverage, it becomes slightly warmer as it moves down your throat and when you drink a hot beverage, that passes along through your mouth and esophagus with some of the heat getting absorbed along the way.
 
When you ingest something above 107 degrees Fahrenheit (42 degrees Celsius), or roughly 10 degrees warmer than your body, it is going to feel warm or mildly hot, but it shouldn’t feel like it is burning. To put this into perspective, an article in the Journal of Food Science reports that the results of a study showed that on average, coffee drinkers preferred their beverage around 140 degrees Fahrenheit. So, even with a spike of nearly 30 degrees, the heat sensation experienced is not too bad and you still will not feel like your throat is on fire.

To protect your body, your mouth and throat both have something called vanilloid receptors (VR1). These receptors are super sensitive to high temperature foods and to those that have a high heat index, like capsaicin, the active ingredient typically found in various types of chili peppers. As a protective measure, the VR1 receptors react to the actual temperature of food, the perceived acidity of food, or the perceived heat associated with spicy foods by stimulating neurons to transmit the sensation of pain to the brain.

So, with most food and beverages, the range of sensitivity to heat and spiciness for you may be wide, but things get more complicated for your system when alcoholic beverages are consumed – in particular with those that contain ethanol.

Ethanol – Fueling Changes in Your System

Ethanol, also known as grain alcohol, is a potent chemical compound found in alcoholic beverages such as tequila. Remarkably, ethanol is also used as a biofuel additive for “clean” cars, just to give you a sense of its strength. Unlike capsaicin which tells the receptors that a food is hot to the taste, ethanol binds to the VR1 receptors found in your mouth and throat making them more sensitive to perceived changes in temperature. Once this bond has formed, changes to the heat threshold takes place by lowering it to just 93.2 degrees Fahrenheit (34 degrees Celsius). While this is not a remarkable swing in temperature, it is enough that your body recognizes a difference than what is normal and causes an activation of responses that affect your skin, spinal cord, and esophagus – giving you a sudden sensation of warmth all over and the nasty burn in your throat.  

A Fight or Flight Type of Reaction

Over time, the human body has adapted to provide warning signals protecting people from various types of danger. Whether it’s a sudden release of adrenaline in life-threatening situations, or a change in the perceived heat or spiciness of an ingested food, biochemical reactions take place to tell us not to do something, ensuring our health and well-being.
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For you, this means when drinking any alcohol containing ethanol, it is your own body that causes the burning sensation when you down that shot.