I’ve had my share of beers made with odd ingredients, from pizza beer to Wynkoop’s bull testicle beer, with all manner of flowers, nuts, fruits, vegetables and tree parts in between. But this one has to take the cake. The Japanese brewery Sankt Gallen created a beer with elephant dung, which reportedly immediately sold out.
According to Drinks Business:
The beer, which is called Un, Kono Kuro, is made using coffee beans that have passed through an elephant.
The Sankt Gallen brewery called the beer a “chocolate stout,” despite it not containing any chocolate. The coffee beans used in the beer come from elephants at Thailand’s Golden Triangle Elephant Foundation, which cost over $100 per 35 grams. The beans are so expensive as 33 kgs of beans in the mouth yields 1 kg of useable coffee beans.
According to another source, International Science Times, the beer “utilizes the flavor of Black Ivory Coffee, a variety of your morning brew that retails for about $500 per pound because the beans are harvested from elephant poop. And by “harvested” we mean picked out of a big pile of dung and rinsed off. The elephant poop beer uses the coffee beans to enhance the flavor in its coffee stout.” They continue.
Un, Kono Kuro is a pun on “unko” which is the Japanese word for “crap,” a fitting name indeed for elephant poop coffee. Although the elephant poop beer was a sales success, don’t expect it hit shelves anytime soon. The brewer, Sankt Gallen, isn’t adding it to their regular line-up. It’s not cheap beer, either; the retail value of a keg of Un, Kono Kuro is around $1100.
So apparently it’s pretty popular. At least one reviewer said it wasn’t bad, saying “there was an initial bitterness that got washed over by a wave of sweetness. Following that, a mellow body rolled in and spread out through my mouth.” Still, this may be going too far. What do you think?
Per my Japanese wife: The label is Unko no kuro. Unko is is Japanese is for “poop”. The label says this is poop beer.
If Hunter Thompson did the label I’m sure he’d say Elephant beer: Good shit!
Crappy beer literally; figuratively, most likely the jury’s mixed … maybe it should have been called “PMS” (Pachyderm Merde Stout) ….
I paint with beer, in part because I like good beer. While I enjoyed your reporting on this “poop” beer, it is unlikely I will move heaven and earth to find one as part of my painting process requires (since I wrote the manual) drinking the beer before and, often during, the beer-painting process. Your Art and Beer section is great as I love what people in the craft beer industry do with their label art and some historical perspective is neat to see! Please, however, draw the line somewhere far left of bodily fluid beers so that I am not compeled to either comment on them here or in my blog or, perish the thought, consider expanding either my paint palette or my Puritan taste palate.
P.S. Your humor in presenting the “poop” beer was refreshing and made my day!!