In the UK, young people's alcohol consumption is considered an important social and health problem, and is the focus of government strategy and intervention. There is widespread concern that many young people are drinking in a 'risky' way. That is, they are often drinking large amounts of alcohol in a single session, in unsupervised locations. This small-scale, quantitative study used a shortened adaptation of the Adolescent Alcohol Expectancy Questionnaire (AEQ) to examine 14-17-year-olds' experience of 'risky' drinking. The results suggest that a major transition towards first ever drunkenness occurs between the ages of 14 and 15. Young people of this age are more likely to be getting very drunk in unsupervised, and potentially more harmful, locations. It is suggested that using this questionnaire could offer the potential to obtain a rapid and reliable indication of young people's propensity towards possible alcohol-related harm.