Drinking from a Squirrel, or The Second Reason I Will Not Buy A $765 Bottle of Beer

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Yes, this is disturbing as hell. I don't know if the tuxedo helps or hurts.

I should begin by admitting that I’m a fan of cheap beer because I still drink alcohol mainly as a means to a buzzy end.  Old Style and PBR, thus, are great non-liquor ways to minimize the cost-per-unit-drunkenness ratio in a slightly tasty manner.  I will try the fancy stuff, though, for the same reason I might rent a Ferrari in Vegas—I need to treat myself once in a (great) while and see how the other half of a half of a half of a half of a half lives.  Example: recently at a craft-beer joint I tried Rodenbach, described to me as a “sour Flemish.”  (From now on when asked what kind of beer I prefer, I’ll respond, “I like my beer like my women: sour and Flemish.”)  More expensive than my usual swill, but worth the money.

At this artisanal beer bar I noticed an interesting trend.  Whereas the stuff that’s normally more powerful than beer—wine, champagne, Scotch, etc.—tends to get better as it gets more expensive, beer just gets weirder.  Much weirder than sour and Flemish.  Instead of variations on a grain or fruit theme, brewers will concoct something like, “fermented with aged and sagacious wagyu beef, frost-brewed in a polar bear’s anus and strained through Scarlett Johansson’s gym panties, then flown to your door by pterodactyls…”  All this booze must be subject, of course, to the law of diminishing returns.  A bottle of wine used as a beverage is not “worth” $160,000.  It’s probably only marginally better than a $100 bottle of wine.  Don’t haughtily explain to me that it is “worth” whatever the market will bear, because no, it’s not, especially when your body turns it into urine and feces and vinegar breath within hours.  I love Scotch, but hell, even if I’m a millionaire I ain’t payin’ $50,000 for a bottle.  Now, if I were a billionaire…  (Also, I say “must be subject” rather than “is subject” because I have never tasted such an expensive alcohol and probably never will.  I would certainly taste it if someone offered, though.)

This brings me to my first objection to a $765 bottle of beer, which you’ve probably already guessed.  Even if it is 55% alcohol and called The End of History (if history is essentially memory, a beer that is over half ethyl alcohol is aptly named), I’ve never had any beer worth that.  I’ve never had a hundred beers worth that.  If this single bottle of beer could pull some Contact shit and send me on an 18-hour cosmic flume ride where I talk about the mysteries of the universe with an alien who looks like a beloved relative, or preferably Beyonce, I’m writing the check now.  But I can already do this.  It’s called two hits of acid, and it’s a lot cheaper.

My second objection is that the bottle is parked in a stuffed animal.  And I mean a taxidermically stuffed animal—a stoat, squirrel, or rabbit, to be specific—not a Care Bear than can give you a cutesy, drunken, awkward Care Bear stare.  That means every time you take a drink, you look at an adorable animal that an old person was feeding in a park.  As you get drunker, which with this beer means when you’re starting on the bottom half, you’ve probably gotten used to sucking face with a squirrel.  But if you were to drink that beer while on acid?  Game over, man.  It’s Arkham for you.  (To its credit(?), BrewDog, the Scottish brewery that made all 12 bottles of The End of History, insists that the critters were road kill.  I have my doubts, though.  Those little guys don’t show tire marks or anything like that.  If they’re road kill, they must have died from heart attacks caused by near misses like in the Pep Boys commercials.)

My final and perhaps most relevant criticism would be that a 55%-by-volume beer, while possibly tasting good, probably tastes like, well, not beer.

Hey, if you’ve got the money and want to spend it on that, no judgments here.  I’ve spent as much money on things you probably think are ridiculous, like a car or a Viking helmet and double-bladed axe.  More than once I’ve been told by a friend that I would “eat the ass end out a dead horse.”  I have to draw the line, though at drinking a craft beer out a dead squirrel.