This sounds a lot like “Underbeg” which is also a digestif. I didn’t list it because it is truly medicinal. It tastes like an entire herb garden WillyWonka’d into a two-tablespoon dose of rubbing alcohol.
But it calms even the most acid stomach immediately. Like, immediately. The moment it goes down your throat, the worst upset of your life is just calmed like Jesus on the waves. It is a little startling how well it works. I have no idea how, but I always keep some in the house.
But it’s not worse than Malort. At least the background bite tastes like rubbing alcohol instead of some ungodly mixture of kerosene and overused engine oil from a bulldozer.
Yeah, I dunno if it’s the “worst” but it was definitely one of the most disappointing. I knew of the drink and its vintage, saw it for sale, bought some and couldn’t get halfway through the bottle before it went down the sink.
That would be sad enough for a no-name novelty soda but this was Moxie! People supposedly drank this stuff enough that, today – a million years later, I still know the name!
Moxie isn’t good, no argument there. It’s no longer availabe but for a while they sold an energy drink that basically took the worst aspects of the original drink and added extra burning and evil.
So take Moxie (please!), add the energy drink additives, and then artificial sweetners!
Actually, I’m not sure it counts, since it’s not the actual original flavor, it was just Moxie trying to jump onto multiple bandwagons (Low carb/diet as well as the energy drink crowd. But apparently you can (or could) get the default Moxie flavor in diet, which was probably disgusting as few diet beverages are an improvment on the original.
For the record though, while I didn’t enjoy Moxie the first and only time I’ve had it, I was able to drink the whole bottle, and didn’t hate it. I just would never buy it for myself for any reason. But I’m in the group that actually enjoys most root beers and a number of sasparilla-adjacent drinks, so I’m probably conditioned to be more accepting.
It definitely tastes of wintergreen. It’s like root beer with gentian root to me, nowhere near as disgusting as its reputation. I thought it would be a lot heavier on the gentian and at least as bitter as tonic water. So disappointing.
Kvass is good; Cel-ray is perfectly unobjectionable. Back when I drank I could put back a whole bottle of malort.
The only drink that’s ever thrown me off my game is lumpy, chunky kefir. My father used to make his own kefir and sometimes it would turn out looking like spoiled milk. I decided to drink it out of curiosity and the texture just threw me I just about threw up. The flavor was fine but … blech.
Yeah, of the things I’ve actually tried. A friend who loved unusual booze (and made his own beer, hard cider and wine, all mostly fine) kept a bottle just to spring on people at parties. I’m the kind of guy who even very much dislikes smoky Islay malts like Laphroaig. And Malört is so very much worse than that on the tire fire scale.
Getting away from the non-booze and non-exotics, I have always held a special loathing for fucking Tab, the foulest of the diet colas. It’s final demise is one of the few good thing that happened in the plague year of 2020. But this may just be a very personal grudge as it was the only soda my mother permitted in the household when I was around age 10-13.
My dad described Tab this way: “It tastes like a tab.” However, I later actually liked it.
I like kombucha too, and tried making my own but the SCOBY developed fuzzy black mold. Any attempts at making sourdough starters end the same way for me.
Honestly, I was expecting Malort to be a lot worse than it was when I actually tried it. It is probably the most bitter thing I’ve ever swallowed, but it wasn’t necessarily a repulsive bitter, and it doesn’t linger as long as, say, gin or Jagermeister.
It has been many years now but I recall a Malort ad they’d hang around each bottle which said 49 out of 50 people who try Malort never try it again. So, that means 2% of people seem to like it (or are into the pain). And, since they are still in business, I guess someone must like it (in the Chicago metro area that’d be around 190,000 people). You may be one of those people.
Every time I think about this question my first answer is always Yoo-Hoo. I drank that exactly one time in my entire life and it was like when I was 10 or 11. Even as a little kid I remember thinking…
“This is just s***** watered down chocolate milk. I can get chocolate milk for a quarter at school. Why would I want to drink this s*** and it’s more expensive?”
