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And this is what they serve when they run out of moose urine too. note Funnily enough, Buffalo Butt is actually a microbrew, and therefore not actually moose urine-type beer; it's actually delicious.
There are generally two kinds of bars in fictionland: those where they serve beer that is the nectar of the gods, and those where the product going into the user's mouth tastes about the same as the stuff that comes out of it later that night. This trope is the latter. Often the mark of a Bad Guy Bar.
Do not expect this to keep the patrons from swilling the stuff anyway, or from handing you your hindquarters if you ever discuss this trope in the bar.
Unfortunately, Truth in Television.
Not to be confused with drinking actual urine, moose or otherwise. Compare and contrast Gargle Blaster, where a drink is rendered undrinkable by the alcohol content rather than taste.
Examples
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Anime & Manga
- Black Lagoon has this in the first episode with Revy calling Rock's beer piss (which leads to a Bacardi drinking contest).
Comic Books
Comic Strips
- From Li'l Abner comes "Kickapoo Joy Juice", a liquor of such stupefying potency that the hardiest citizens of Dogpatch, after the first burning sip, rose into the air, stiff as frozen codfish. If it needed more body, they'd throw one in... usually the body of a moose, bear or polecat. The fumes alone had been known to melt the rivets off battleships.
Films — Animation
- In the first bar scene from Akira, the bartender yells at Yamagata, who has come to pick up his friend and leader Kaneda, to buy something for once, since "this ain't a hangout for damned street-gangs!" Yamagata's response: "Yeah, right! And drink your dog piss?"
Films — Live-Action
- As part of the Training Montage in Beerfest, the protagonists decide to try desensitizing their taste buds with actual animal urine.
Fink: Because of the pH balance?
Gam Gam: No, because if you can drink ram's piss, [expletive] you can drink just about anything.
- In the movie Desperado, the small corner bar in a little Mexican town has notoriously bad beer, likened to piss. Chances are the bartender and his associates have deliberately made the beer as bad as possible, to keep casual customers away — the bar is actually a front for illegal operations.
Girl: And your beer tastes like piss.
Bartender: Yeah, we know!
Tavo: 'Cause we piss in it!
Bartender: And that's not all...
Gamebooks
- This is the case with some of the beers found in the taverns of the world of Lone Wolf.
- In The Jungle of Horrors, if you take the river barge path, Paido spitting out "Ferina Nog" and calling it "bilge juice" almost starts a bar brawl. Of course, it's still much safer than drinking Bor Brew ale.
- In the first book of the New Order series, some ale is described as having "a peculiar smell that makes you think of greasy animal hides."
Literature
Live-Action TV
Tabletop Games
Video Games
Web Comics
- In Dominic Deegan Stonewater thinks of human beer this way. Halflings also think Dwarf beer tastes like "piss water" (Dwarves find Halfling beer "snobby").
- The Gods Of Arr Kelaan: Bikk tried to jumpstart a religion for Ronson (God of Alcohol) by impersonating him and giving two soldiers mugs of ale that would always be full when turned upright. But since Bikk doesn't know squat about brewing, the ale was very poor quality. One of the soldiers was able to start a bar using his mug, since "if it's cheap enough, people will drink anything." Said beer does prevent aging, though. The other soldier started a temple based around his mug, though he had to forbid his followers from drinking any of the "holy ale" to make it believable.
- In one arc of Pv P, several characters decide to take up brewing, and make an incredibly horrible-tasting beer, which they market as coffee flavored. Robbie proves to be such an appalling brewmaster that his first attempt produces something with the flavor of a quite excellent lager, but the consistency of soft-serve. They test-market it as "lagurt" in a tube (ala Go-Gurt) for hip young frat boys on the go, and it tests quite well, but Robbie is so bent on making high-class brews instead of profitable trendy fad hooch that he throws a tantrum and gives up on the whole thing.
- Kenny of The Kenny Chronicles is of the opinion that all beer tastes worse than piss (and he would know).
- The second strip of Van Von Hunter has a technomage conjuring a mini-fridge of beer "from the FUTURE!"
Van Von Hunter: It tastes like piss...
Technomage: Yeah, unfortunately all beer from the future is like that.
Western Animation
Real Life
- Episode #396 "#1 Party School" of This American Life, focusing on #1 Party School Penn State found that the beer of choice for on-campus residents (Natural Light) was hated by nearly everyone who drank it. Ira was naturally puzzled why they would drink it if they hated it so much. Answer? It was cheap, and it got them drunk.
- Which explains the success of Rolling Rock which, for $1.50 a bottle at happy hours, was a good beer. After the price hike to $3.50 a bottle it turned into horse piss.
- For the record, the (mostly) complete list of Cheap Beers American College Students Drink 'Cos They're Cheap:
- Natural Light and Natural Ice ("Natty" for short)
- Busch (a.k.a. "Reject Batches of Budweiser")
- Busch Light (a.k.a. "Reject Batches of Bud Light")
- Pabst Blue Ribbon ("PBR", traditionally the province of working-class Midwesterners, now consumed "ironically" by hipsters; oddly, sold like an ultra-premium in China)
- Miller High Life (often mocked for its rather ironic advertising slogan, "the champagne of beers")
- Milwaukee's Best (the legendary "beast", a.k.a. "Milwaukee's Worst"), also comes in light and high-alcohol ice
- Keystone Light and Keystone Ice (a.k.a. "Reject Batches of Coors Light").
- Blatz (Midwest only; a.k.a. "Slightly Better Batches of PBR")
- Old Milwaukee (Midwest and some of the South,note It's available in Texas, apparently a.k.a. "Reject batches of PBR"—believe it or not)
- National Bohemian (Mid-Atlantic only, particularly MD, a.k.a. Natty Boh')
- Molson (Northern New England only, known as the "Canadian Budweiser" for its similarly ubiquitous nature, low cost, and abysmal quality.)
- For British tropers, Carling or Fosters — these are the two staple lagers of pubs nationwide. Fortunately, you tend to find both. If not, there'll be Carlsberg to offer some reprieve. Regardless, depends on the quality of the pub.
- In Scotland, Tennant's has this dubious honour instead.
- Note to any Australians reading this: The Fosters we drink here is brewed under license and apparently tastes much, much worse than the Australian one. It's still better than the British equivalent of Castlemaine, which used to be brewed next to the site of an old coal-gas plant so badly contaminated by toxic waste that it took decades to clean up... at which point they moved production elsewhere, presumably because the beer just wasn't the same any more.
- There's also the stereotype among Europeans, especially Germans, that American beer is basically just piss-colored water pretending to be beer. Many Americans hold this opinion of many of the more popular American beers themselves, preferring more distinctive local microbreweries or home brews.
- Americans for their part have similar reaction to the idea of beer not being chilled. Probably because just about every mass-market American beer is a lager. Lagers are always served cold, the world over (if there is any infrastructure to allow it). Ales, Porters, and Stouts; there there is some debate (you definitely don't chill them as much as lagers though).
- When President Obama met Prime Minister David Cameron for a casual beer (in front of eighty million cameras) each brought a favourite beer from their own home country. Despite Cameron's protests that the flavour of the (very cultured) Hobgoblin Beer from the Wychwood Brewery in his constituency of Oxfordshire that he brought for Obama to try would be ruined by chilling it to ice cold, Obama absolutely insisted on putting it in the fridge. You would think Obama would trust him, or at least, the guidelines on the bottle, enough to try a beer as intended. Apparently not. See a picture of the event here◊. note For those wondering, the yellow-labelled beer Cameron is holding on the left is Goose Island Brewery's 312 Urban Wheat Ale, produced in Obama's adoptive hometown of Chicago. Incidentally, Hobgoblin is well known in England for its humorously scathing criticism◊ of people who drink cheap tasteless lager, something Cameron would have been very aware of.
- Sometimes its a storage thing. Beers are sometimes served at "room temperature" outside of America, but because of the way they're stored (sometimes in specially designed cool rooms, even), a British "room temperature" beer is a good ten degrees cooler than an American one, meaning that, confusion over wording aside, a room temperature beer there isn't the warm, nasty, skunked-out swig of sadness it is here in the US.
- A British top-fermented beer is supposed to be served at cellar temperature, which for a proper cellar keeping the beer at its best will be too cool for the drinker to be comfortable in the bar. The beer shouldn't be at ambient temperature and should feel cool, but certainly not ice-cold.
- The US has large swathes of territory where it regularly gets well into the triple digits Fahrenheit (over 40*C), often with swelteringly high humidity alongside it—and Washington DC is in one of those areas (having been built in the middle of a Southern Tidewater swamp; it can get absurdly hot as late as October). In that sort of environment, enjoying beer for its flavor often takes a backseat to the desperate need for something cold and refreshing.
- A reference to British warm beer is an automatic laugh-line in the US, where British "cuisine" is thought to be inedible: blood pudding, kippers (smoked and fried herrings) and so on.
- Finnish beer "Lapin kulta" (Lappland's gold) has many names, but is mainly known as "poron kusi" (reindeer piss). Americans tend to like it. People who drink beer for flavour tend to hate it.
- There's a local brand of "Bear Whiz Beer" in upstate Minnesota, the logo for which is a Funny Animal bear peeing in a lake. Based on a sketch by The Firesign Theatre, of course.
- Ever tasted (cheap) Russian beer? No? Keep it like that.
- Same with the beer in the baltic states, wich manages to be even worse by a wide margin.
- Premium Russian beers, on the other hand, are quite good, but they inevitably follow the came vicious circle:
1. A brewer decides to do something about all the horse piss around
2. Creates and sells a good beer
3. Makes a crapload of money
4. Realizes that there's even more to make if only the beer was cheaper
5. Creates a cheaper beer
6. Joins the throngs of horse-piss makers
8. PROFIT!!!
- To many people who don't like beer, all beer smells vaguely urine-ish. Either that or like paint thinner. This is because alcohol in low concentrations smells (and tastes) a fair amount like urea. The color certainly doesn't lend it any favors.
- Then, of course, there's the fact that ingesting alcohol in any quantity accelerates kidney function, meaning you'll have to take a whiz after downing a few brews. Cue the "in-one-end-and-out-the-other" and "you-don't-buy-it-you-rent-it" jokes...
- In Ireland, Dutch Gold (often nicknamed "Dutch Mould") is well known as cheap, watered down piss. It's incredibly popular, particularly in Dublin's Fair City, mostly due to its low cost.
- During the American prohibition era, many bars were forced to buy home-brewed beer of dubious quality. While plenty of speakeasies got good home-brews, a lot of crummier places had to sell cheap, poorly-made and terrible-tasting liquor. Being as these beers had been known to cause blindness, bad taste might be the best you could hope for.
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