Just In Time For Christmas

One of the online fora I am active on included a pointer this week to a blog post showing some interesting Laotian rice wine:

(You can see an even bigger version of that photo at the author’s Flickr page.)

I’m not opposed to liquor with stuff in it generally–but there is some stuff that probably doesn’t belong in my booze. There’s probably no way I would be able to make myself drink that stuff barring some kind of Australia-level insobriety–my creepy-crawly-slithery disgust reflex is pretty high. I do think a bottle of that might make a highly amusing present for certain of my acquaintances. Especially the more macho and dedicated to drinking among them.

And, thanks to the Internets, I don’t have to be hiking through Laos to get some.

I could buy a bottle of snake wine online. I’d love to give something like that to my little brother.

I could buy a bottle of scorpion wine online. Hmm… I think Neil is back on hard liquor after New Year’s….

For maximum shudders I could slide over to Thailand and order up a bottle of Giant Centipede Whiskey–I know a couple of whiskey connoisseurs I’m sure I could tricktalk into trying that.

Triple distilled Thai white whiskey infused with a highly venomous tropical giant centipede.

The centipede infused inside the bottle has been detoxified to make safe for human consumption.

I am unsure about the “highly venomous” and “detoxified” combo–isn’t that like decaffeinating espresso?

Of course, after the centipede, none of the other ones seems so bad. Hell, the Herbal Gecko Wine is positively inviting if the other choice is hundred-legged.

My ha-ha-other-cultures-find-different-things-disgusting amusement goes up a notch when the combination seems particularly odd, as with the
Banana Flavoured Scorpion Liqueur.

This special distilled Thai rice grain vodka is infused with a real farm raised Heterometrus Spinifer scorpion and flavoured with banana and sweetened with Thai sugar cane. The vodka is steeped for several months, which then imparts a unique flavour into the liquor, the vodka is then sweetened and flavoured to taste.

…

Best served neat, on the rocks or in shots.

However, there is certainly a place where the whole “it’s another culture, I can’t judge” thing runs headlong into the urge to just grab an entire people by the shoulders and ask them what they hell they were thinking. Like say, people who eat dung beetles. I might intellectually be able to grasp that a bug-based diet gets better return on caloric investment than a carnivorous one, and I might even be able to stretch to say that bugs that feed on waste would make even more sense from an environmental minimum impact viewpoint, but I think that rationality would lose out pretty quickly to the whole shake-by-the-shoulders urge.

I do know one or two people I’d love to send those to as a present, though. But that’s just me being mean.