People Have Use The Darnedest Things To Get A Buzz!

#1 Moldy Fruit & Ketchup

Get ready to supress your gag reflex. Prisoners just have to work with what's available. Inmates stash the fruit they get at meals and toss it into a plastic garbage bag. By some accounts, they let it start to rot. Then they sweeten it with whatever they can get their hands onsugar, drink mixes, even ketchup. Yeah, ketchup. Because the prisoners have no direct access to yeast, they just toss in a few slices of bread and hope for the best. After many days of fermenting, you end up with pruno, a.k.a. prison wine. Some guys take the pruno and distill it into lightning, which can be as high as 160-proof. Both beverages are extremely dangerous.

#2 Monkey Puzzle Tree

A weird conifer native to Chile and Argentina, this tree can trace its ancestry back 180 million years. The trees, which can live over a thousand years, produce seeds about the size of an almond that the Pehuenche people boil and ferment to make mudai. The Chilean government designated the tree a national monument, making this perhaps the world's only alcoholic beverage to be brewed from a national monument.

#3 Spruce Tree

Captain Cook relied upon a beer recipe given to him by botanist Joseph Banks to cure his crew of scurvy. It called for boiling spruce twigs in water with tea, then mixing with molasses and beer or yeast to start the fermentation process. High in ascorbic acid, spruce trees kept the crew healthy when there was no fruit to be had.

#4 Aloe

Aloe vera sap is one of the bitterest flavors ever added to a drink. The bitter component, aloin, is filtered out of aloe juice but prized by distillers, who use it to give a bracing backbone to Fernet-style amaros. Due to genetic variations in how we experience flavors, some people are highly sensitive to aloin and others can only taste it at high concentrationswhich may explain why some of us love Fernet Branca and others can't tolerate it.

#5 Snake, scorpion, and lizard wine

Snake wine is used as a restorative. A large venomous snake is placed into a glass jar of rice wine, sometimes with smaller snakes and medical herbs, then left to steep for many months.

#6 Rice Wine with baby mice

Immersed in this traditional Chinese and Korean health tonic are a bunch of little mice (no more than three days old) with closed eyes.

#7 Kumis (or Kymyz)

This lightly alcholic drink of Central Asia contains only between 0.7 and 2.5% alcohol. It's a fermented dairy product made from mare's milk, which has 40% more lactose than cow's milk before the fermentation process.

#8 Seagull Wine

The weirdest of all drinks was invented by the Inuits. To make the drink, stuff a dead seagull into a bottle of water and put in direct sunlight until fermented.

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