Probably a Moretti, though I suspect (hope) it wasn’t supposed to taste like that. It was most likely old and/or not stored well.
The worst that comes to mind that was supposed to taste like that - I even had it at one of their brewpubs - was the Dogfish Head 120 Minute IPA. Liked their 90 Minute, the 60 was a bit too much hops for me, but the 120 Minute was so goddamned sweet that my face involuntary squished up in distaste, and I passed the sample on to another in my group. None of us really liked that particular variety. Yeah yeah, heresy, whatever, I like their other beers, including the Raison d’Etre and Raison d’Extra.
I don’t have too many “omg ew” experiences with beer (knocks wood) thankfully - after drinking lots of crap PBR/whatever is the cheapest keg beer at house parties in college, I made a point of trying to be careful about what beer I drank.
I can’t remember what brand it was, But I had a microbrew Scotch ale that was absolutely undrinkable. I think they mixed malt liquor and water with cheep barley wine. It tasted like rancid soy sauce and battery acid. It was everything I could do not to puke after the first sip.
Aside from some amateur homebrews, probably some of the grandpa beers of the 1980s; Piel’s, Goebel, and Red White and Blue. Champale and Crazy Horse - yuk.
The worst of the worst, though:
Koch’s Golden Anniversary - the template for old man beers.
Bard’s Tale - a name Dopers would love, but a taste that would leave them retching. Tastes like a first time homebrewer’s experiment.
A beer I tried whilst studying in London was a horrible horrible beer called London’s Pride it was one of the first beers I tried there…it’s a wonder I didn’t give up trying after that atrocity of beer.
Flashback: just arrived in Vietnam, over 100 degrees, cooling my heels in Tien Sha. Someone says “Hey! It’s Poor Richard’s night at the club. Beer’s a nickel!” Hey, I’ve got a dollar, let’s go get fucked up. The only beer they served on PRN was Ballantine. It was warm and had been sitting on pallets in the sun for god knows how long. The steel cans were rusty. The first swig made my throat constrict, and the taste can only be described as beer-flavored gunmetal. I held my nose and got through the first one, thinking that once you get going, taste doesn’t matter anyway. Wrong. The more I tried, the worse it got. A horrible experience, and not because people would be shooting at me for the coming year.
Equally bad was the Egyptian beer called Stella. This is NOT Stella Artois; this is pig piss with unidentifiable bits floating in it. It’s quite possibly worse than the above-excoriated Ballantine. We drank it when desperate and only out of a glass, so we could see what was living in there.
Pilsner Urquell. In it’s defense, I think it was skunked. I also once thought I was too sick to drink beer because I was drinking a skunked Yeungling, which I love. Switched to a fresh one and I was fine. The worst non-skunked beer I ever had was King Cobra malt liquor. Like it had been drunk and then vomited back into the bottle.
This is a very difficult question, as any of the cheap beers as sold in “supermarkets-for-the-unemployed” (Lidl, Aldi,…) would win. Their only purpose is to get pissed for cheap.
I don’t remember the brand, but a friend had picked it up for a 4th of July party a few years back thinking it was a Belgian ale he hadn’t tried before. We sat down in the living room and popped the ceramic cork on it, and we heard “What the hell is that?” from the kitchen. I looked at the tiny lettering on the back of the “Belgian” style ale. Made in France.
To this day, I’m not sure if the purpose of that vile concoction was to bolster wine sales, or insult Belgium.
I love clamato but that shit is vile. The smell alone makes you want to vomit in your mouth a bit. The resulting vomit taste would be better than chelada.
Living in the backwoods of China far away financially and geographically from the comparative wonders of Tsingtao and Harbin beer, we swill warm bottles of a pathetic 3.2% brew supposedly from Chongqing (my sources tell me in my town it is all fake) called Shancheng- best ordered with a good Sichuanhua “Waaaaaayyy lao-berrrrrrr yi ping sanchennnnn.”
Well, a few weeks ago, someone in the fake Shancheng factory must have fallen asleep on the job, because every bottle was just undrinkable. No carbonation at all. A pronounced unnatural off taste. Just a warm flat glass of chemicals. It was just disgusting. It was not even recognizable as beer.
Of course all of town quickly noticed that the Shancheng sucked and began to order the venerable Snow beer. Snow is unique in that they simply bought out local breweries all over China, and didn’t bother to change the recipes. So Snow is different in every city. Our city’s is okay, but it’s slightly more expensive and our friend swears that the chemicals in it gave him liver damage.
For weeks this Shancheng beer sat in cases all over town, nobody ordering it. It took the better part of a month for them to run out of it and get the new batch.
I second Colt 45 menthol, also marketed under the name “Cool Colt.” Our finest minds working in concert for a decade couldn’t devise a more foul tasting abomination. On the other hand, an acquaintance told me an opened 40 of it with one drink taken from it (and then spat out) stayed in his apartment for a week, and made it smell nice and minty.