If you love beer, you drink it. If you’re obsessed with beer, you make your own. If you have a full-on beer fetish, you want your beer to be as sexy as possible. And what’s sexier than your damn self? Perhaps…nothing.
I believe this was Rogue Brewmaster John Maier’s thinking when he brewed Beard Beer, a beer fermented with yeast cultivated from John’s own personal beard. While I haven’t sampled Beard Beer myself, it’s a concept I can really get behind. Who wouldn’t want a piece of themselves in their beer baby? Or better yet, a piece of their most hated cat?
This was certainly my thinking when I decided that mine and my husband’s next homebrew adventure should involve Harvey, our semi-popular but mostly terrible cat who appears in almost all of our Beer Parrot pictures. “The readers will love it and so will Harvey!” I exclaimed, even though I was pretty sure I was lying.
It took a lot of convincing, not only to get my husband on board with this idea, but to then keep the experiment a secret from our friends, who would surely judge our cat-tastic decision. They’d say, “That’s crazy!” and “You’re going to go to jail!” and “Your cat licks your other cat’s butthole!” While all of this is true, it wasn’t enough to stop us, and we began trying to figure out how we could extract wild yeast from Harvey’s fur (the fur that’s not too close to his poo bits).
Luckily for us, this part wasn’t actually very hard. When you both attend The University of Texas and then go on to work there for a few years, you make several helpful contacts in the academic field. All we needed was somebody who could put cat fur into a test tube and then use a lab to do all that magic stuff with it. Not too far down our line of contacts, we found just the guy who knew just the guy. Within a few weeks, we were the proud owners of our very own cat yeast! It was just as disgusting as it sounds.
With the yeast nestled snugly in our fridge, we rushed to our local homebrew store to buy the rest of our beer fixins. That same day, we set to brewing. Finally, after a full month of fur-mentation, we tasted our Cat Hair Homebrew.
This has got to be the coolest/weirdest beer I’ve ever had. When I first popped the bottle, a strange, but kind of pleasant aroma caught my face by the olfactories. Like the scent of a litter box, right after it’s been changed.
I poured the beer into a pint glass to examine the color, but this proved to be unhelpful because the beer looked vastly different depending on the lighting. At times it was orange-ish, then more of a white, then downright black. I guess the only way to describe it is calico.
At last, I took a sip of the beer and immediately began to meow. I grew a long tail and whiskers and my hands became paws. I developed the urge to scratch all things and show everyone my butthole. I fell asleep everywhere and got so mad that my food was imperfect. I set our house on fire to teach us a lesson about how to treat cats.
If you get a chance to try our Cat Hair Homebrew, I recommend you parrot with April Fools Day or other such nonsense. Cheerio(s)!