How often does this happen to you? You’re hosting a posh dinner party, themed around everybody’s favorite bizarro kids’ author, Roald Dahl. But while your guests are gorging themselves on pheasants, snozzberries, and chocolate cake, their throats are quickly growing parched. You run to the wine cellar, only to find that some Augustus Gloop of a party crasher has guzzled your entire stockpile of James And The Giant Pinot. What to serve in its place? How can you make sure that every drop of your beverage of choice is infused with Dahl’s rebellious spirit (and also maybe some other, grosser stuff, as well)?
Boing Boing is reporting on a possible solution, developed by British brewery 40FT: a beer brewed from yeast scraped out of the custom-made armchair Dahl sat in for much of his writing career. Infused with decades worth of what decorum forces us to refer to simply as “George’s Marvelous Medicine,” the chair’s wild yeast colony presumably contains at least a few ancestor cells grown from Dahl’s own flaked off skin, thus answering the question, “What’s grosser than all the farting material in The BFG?”
To be fair, there’s nothing all that new about cooking or brewing with yeast that has its origins in the human body. (Most notably, artist Toi Sennhauser brewed “The Mother Of All Beers,” developed from yeast procured from her own vagina, back in 2005.) And it’s not like the ever-prurient Dahl probably wouldn’t have gotten a kick out of “Mr. Twit’s Odious Ale,” despite the fact that it kind of sounds like one of the macabre punishments that happen to unlucky kids in The Witches. The stuff is being brewed up for a stage production of The Twits by London’s Les Enfants Terribles theater, in celebration of Dahl’s 100th birthday on September 13. Get your tickets/barf bags now, kid-lit fans!