Basic Trope: An alcoholic drink — usually beer — that tastes bad (or has no flavour).
- Straight:
- Bad Guy Beer, the beer served at the local Bad Guy Bar, tastes like piss.
- Bad Guy Beer is almost flavourless.
- Exaggerated:
- Bad Guy Beer is so terrible that actual moose urine tastes better.
- Bad Guy Beer tastes so awful that most characters vomit after a sip or two.
- Bad Guy Beer has no flavour whatsoever.
- Downplayed: Bad Guy Beer is cheap and kind of bad, but not "it tastes like piss" levels of bad.
- Justified:
- Bad Guy Beer is quite literally moose piss.
- Bad Guy Beer is a cheap, crappy beer. It's still on the market because it appeals to people who just want to get drunk for as cheap as possible.
- Bad Guy Beer is the result of a Lethal Chef trying to make beer.
- Bad Guy Beer appeals to a very small niche of people who can actually stomach that crap.
- Inverted: Bad Guy Beer is so delicious that it always causes Beergasms.
- Subverted: Alice complains about the taste of Bad Guy Beer, but she turns out to be the kind of person who thinks all beer tastes bad.
- Double Subverted: In the case of Bad Guy Beer, everyone agrees with Alice that it tastes bad.
- Parodied:
- Bad Guy Beer is literally carbonated urine.
- Bad Guy Beer is just carbonated water with brown food colouring.
- The Bad Guy Bar only offers beer "for rent". (It looks like urine, tastes like urine, and quickly comes out as urine...)
- Alice drinks a bottle of urine disguised as Bad Guy Beer and thinks it is an improvement.
- Zig-Zagged: The brewery that makes Bad Guy Beer is very inconsistent: sometimes the beer is delicious, sometimes it's passable, and sometimes it's awful.
- Averted: Bad Guy Beer tastes just fine.
- Enforced: The executives forced the writers to portray alcohol in a negative light. If all the beer in the work is shown to taste bad, will the young audience still be tempted to try it?
- Lampshaded:
- "This bar doesn't serve anything drinkable. I'm surprised it's still in business."
- "Bad Guy Beer. More like Bad Beer."
- Invoked: The Bad Guy Bar is a front for illegal operations, and instructs their brewery to intentionally make the beer taste bad so that they can keep casual customers away.
- Exploited: A criminal front discovers an awful brand named Bad Guy Beer, and decides to exclusively serve it in order to keep casual customers away.
- Defied: The brewery behind Bad Guy Beer notices the horrible reception of its products and tries to improve them.
- Discussed: "That bar looks shabby. I bet the beer tastes like urine or warm water."
- Conversed: "Why does so much beer in fiction taste awful?"
- Implied: Bob orders a glass of Bad Guy Beer. Even though he's thirsty, he doesn't finish it.
- Deconstructed: The brewery goes out of business because no one wants to buy the awful Bad Guy Beer.
- Reconstructed: The brewery finds out that it can get away with selling awful beer if it's cheap (which at least makes it appeal to people who just want to get drunk).
- Played for Laughs: Bad Guy Beer is so bad that the characters like to prank each other by secretly replacing good beer with Bad Guy Beer.
- Played for Drama:
- The reason Bad Guy Beer tastes bad is to mask the taste of poison if the bar ever wants/needs to kill a customer.
- The work is about Bob's struggle to run a brewery. He's sympathetic and wants to offer a good product, but struggles to make anything that's even drinkable...
- Played for Horror: Bob drinks some Bad Guy Beer and complains that it tastes even worse than usual. He find out too late that it's because the beer was laced with a bitter poison/drug, and now a horrifying death awaits him...
Back to A Tankard of Moose Urine.
