Funny how the flavor of the rum in these stories never seems to be too adversely affected by extended periods of carcass-induced contamination. I would have thought that an entire human corpse’s worth of skin dander, sebaceous discharges, gastroenteric leakage, lung mucus, eyeball seepage and other diverse secretions would tend to make even the most robust brew conspicuously skunky after awhile, but evidently not.
The Hungarian story even goes out of its way to emphasize how the workers in question thought the rum was so amazingly delicious that they took some bottles home with them. You’d imagine that at least one of these cadaver-kegger stories would be like,* “They were immediately revulsed at the rum’s putrid odor, not to mention the thick wads of greasy hair that repeatedly clogged the tap. Being desperately poor Hungarian alcoholics, however, they reluctantly drank it anyway.”*
Next time I buy some rum, I’m going to have to remember to mix in some of my dirty bathwater, just as an experiment. Maybe these urban legends do contain a grain of truth, and sloughed-off human residue is actually a secret flavor enhancer taught only to 33rd-Level Bartenders.