History Main / WateringDown

See also ATankardOfMooseUrine.

* In some versions of the Franchise/{{Batman}} franchise, the Penguin has shifted from outright crime to running a nightclub, where he makes far more money selling overpriced souvenirs and, yes, watered-down drinks.

--> "Chili powder. Did I not tell you how moronic that was?"

** At a school event, Principal Skinner instructs Willie to water down the remaining orange drink, who claims watering it down any more isn't even ''possible.''

** Bart is sent as a foreign exchange student to France, only to find out that he's basically been sold as a slave to shoddy wine makers. Unable to speak the language, he toils for weeks as the men abuse him. One day, immersion kicks in and he realizes he's fluent. He immediately runs to a cop and tells him how the men beat and starve him and cut the wine with antifreeze. The officer listens stoically until he gets to the part about the wine. To which he's horrified and rushes off to arrest the men.

** ''Literature/Tigana'': the fashion is to drink [[{{Uncoffee}} kav]] laced with liqueurs. At the beginning of the novel, as word spreads that one of the city's patriarchs has died, people are flooding into bars to gossip about it. In the inn where the artists and musicians drink, the bartender gets so excited that he actually starts pouring full measures of booze until his wife notices and makes him stop.

* Guy Gavriel Kay's ''Literature/TheSarantineMosaic'', being HistoricalFantasy based on Byzantine (eastern Roman Empire) events, has most people watering their wine regularly in Sarantine society. Taking one's wine undiluted is considered a sign of a dissolute drunkard - reasonable, given how much wine everyone seems to drink throughout the day.

** Though note that the "sawdust" in this and other similar stories often refers to the ground tree bark that for many species of trees contain an actually edible and nutritious, if hardly tasty part. This part was stripped off and ground into powder to stretch the flour supplies and make use of the otherwise unpalatable food source. In fact, this trick is centuries old, and the tree bark was long known as a [[ReducedToRatburgers famine food]] in Northern Europe.

** A certain class of upper-class snobs like to label their alcohol backwards (so that whiskey is read as "yeksihw" and port as "trop") to prevent their servants from stealing sips from the bottles. In response, the butlers top the bottles up with "eniru" after they've had their fill

** In Literature/TheBible, when Jesus performed his first miracle (turning water into wine at the Wedding at Cana), he turned it into ''the very best'' wine. One of the guests passes comment about it to the host, since the usual practice was to water it down and use cheaper wine overall.

** This is actually in Literature/TheBible even; when Jesus performed his first miracle (turning water into wine at the Wedding at Cana) he didn't turn water into any old wine, he turned it into ''the very best'' wine, and one of the guests passes comment about it to the host, since the usual practice was to not just water it down but trot out a cheaper wine overall.

* This is [[DiscussedTrope discussed]] in ''Manga/SilverSpoon'', when Yugo asks one of the staff of Ooezo about a way to make money. He replies that an easy way for a dairy farmer to increase profits is by watering down their milk, which gets mixed in with others from nearby farms, so no one will notice at the store. He then goes on to explain how they're checked for this by weight and freezing point, which you can bypass by either adding too little for them to detect or figuring out which days they measure.

'''Man:''': [[spoiler:[[AC:If you even think about it, I will kill you!]]]]

* Lana Lee, the business-minded owner of the Night of Joy bar in ''AConfederacyOfDunces'' also waters down the drinks of her "hostess" Darlene...but she also waters down ''all the other drinks'' as a cost-cutting measure. [[JiveTurkey Burma Jones]] frequently comments on it--particularly how it might be cutting into her profits, as people won't come back to a bar where they get too-weak drinks.

* Rationing in WorldWarII led to this -- in more ways than one. During the siege of Leningrad, the food situation got so precarious that the Soviets started issuing bread filled out with ''sawdust'', and the Germans themselves would later give the foodstuff to [=POW=]s, impressed foreign workers and concentration camp internees.

* In ''VideoGame/{{BioShock|1}}'', minor character Pierre Gobbi has an audio diary complaining about the hellhole Rapture is turning out to be; but there is ''one'' thing he cannot stand: Worley Winery, producers of the fine wine Arcadia Merlot, watering down their wine. They then claim that at least they are using distilled water, and not seawater.

* Averted with JanisJoplin. Apparently, she was just one of several people killed by a dealer who failed to cut his batch of heroin enough to make it "safe".

* On a lighter note, diluting alcohol with sodas or fruit juices to make larger, less alcoholic beverages is one of the staples of modern bartending. From a purely economic perspective, this benefits more or less everyone: the weaker drinks make cheap liquor sippable, reducing the cost of drinking to the consumer, and buying cheaper liquor allows bars to serve more customers. Even liquor connoisseurs benefit, since premium, high-quality spirits are usually available in the bar but must be ordered by name, leaving them to those who know them by name and presumably will not adulterate them with soft drinks.[[note]]Not always, though--NouveauRiche have a tendency to order mixed drinks with high-quality alcoholic beverages as a means of ConspicuousConsumption. Case in point: British footballers' drink of choice, Cristal champagne mixed with Diet Coke.
** Ironically making it even worse for some: Diet Coke is sweetened with the aspartame, a synthetic sweetener that has a strong and somewhat unpleasant off-taste that is generally undetectable by most humans, but is easily felt by about of quarter of them due to genetic variation.

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* In ''AmericanPsycho'', a couple of the yuppies complain about how the cocaine they've been sold is "a gram of fucking Nutrasweet".

* Rosie does this on ''[[{{Series/Mash}} M*A*S*H]]'' to keep the prices down.