If you’re not into liquors, they probably all taste bad to you, but there’s a particular liquor that everyone agrees tastes horrible. It’s called malört and, over the years, it has been compared to battery acid, pesticide and gasoline.

Although Jeppson’s Malört is most often associated with the American city of Chicago, its true roots are in Sweden, where where “malört” is the word for wormwood, the key ingredient in this ghastly spirit. Wormwood is a notoriously bitter herb known for its ability to kill stomach worms and other parasites. The Swedes started infusing it in alcohol and using it as medicine for digestive problems in the 15th century, and it reached US shores with the first Swedish immigrants. The awful taste didn’t appeal to many, so it’s no wonder that malört faded into obscurity pretty much everywhere, except Chicago. For some reason, people here not only accepted its horrible aroma, they actually embraced it.

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Jacu Bird Coffee is one of the world’s rarest and most expensive coffee varieties. It is made from coffee cherries ingested, digested and excreted by Jacu birds.

At around 50 hectares, the Camocim Estate is one of the smallest coffee plantations in Brazil, but it still manages to rake it quite a nice profit thanks to a very unique and sought-after type of coffee. It all started in the early 2000s, when Henrique Sloper de Araújo woke up to find that his precious plantations had been overrun by Jacu birds, an endangered, pheasant-like bird species, protected in Brazil. They weren’t known to be coffee cherry fans, but they seemed to love de Araújo’s organic coffee. But they were going to pay him back for the meal in the most unusual way.

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If you thought Coca Cola Vanilla was weird soft drink, the flavors developed by Shizuoka Prefecture-based company Kimura Beverage will probably blow your mind.

When it comes to new and completely unexplored soft drink flavors, Kimura Beverage is considered somewhat of a pioneer in Japan. Remember, this is the same country where limited edition flavors for popular soft drinks – like sakura Pepsi or Coca Cola Apple – are pretty much the norm. What sets Kimura apart from any other drinks company is the originality of their flavors, which range from pickled plums to fish eggs and potato chips.

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Onion hardly seems like the best vegetable to base a soft drink on, but Onionade doesn’t contain the kind of onion you’re used to, but a new type that not only doesn’t make you cry when you chop it, but it unusually sweet as well.

Back in 2016 we reported on one of the most interesting inventions to come out of Japan in the past few years – a tear-free onion named “Smile Ball”. Developed over a period of 14 years by scientists at House Foods Group, Smile Ball onions release almost no tear-inducing compounds when chopped or eaten raw, and have a much sweeter taste than regular onions. Available in Japanese grocery stores for the past two years, Smile Balls have been marketed mainly as tear-free alternatives to the common onion, but now its producers want to promote the vegetable’s sweetness and pleasant flavor as well. And what better way to do that than by producing an onion-based drink called Onionade?

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The Münch, a small coffee house in Osaka, Japan, is probably the only place in the world where you can enjoy a cup of freshly brewed 22-year-old coffee. That’s if you can afford it, as a cup will set you back a whopping $914.

The story of what many consider the world’s most expensive cup of coffee started decades ago, totally by mistake. Kanji Tanaka, the owner and sole employee of The Münch, used to a type of ice coffee in the refrigerator so he could serve it to customers right away, only one time he forgot a batch of it in the fridge for over half a year. He couldn’t possibly serve it to paying customers anymore, but before throwing it out he decided to take a sip and see how it tasted. To his surprise, the coffee was still good and had acquired a special flavor.

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An international team of scientists studying the exclusion zone around Chernobyl recently unveiled a bottle of vodka made with water and cereal grown in the area around the abandoned nuclear power plant.

Called ‘Atomik’, this vodka is the first consumer product to have come out of the Chernobyl exclusion zone ever since the nuclear catastrophe that hit Ukraine in 1986. The grains used to make it were grown on a farm located withing the zone, and while analysis showed that they did some radioactive elements, the distillation process reportedly removed all impurities so the Atomik Vodka was found to contain the same radioactive compound as any other spirits drink – natural Carbon-14.

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If you’re looking for the ultimate instagrammable coffee, you’ll have a tough time finding something cooler than Sweet Little Rain. That’s an odd name for a cup of coffee, but once you see it in action, you’ll realize it makes perfect sense.

Mellower Coffee, a Chinese coffee shop chain headquartered in Shanghai, owes much of its popularity to its gimmicky Sweet Little Rain, a large cup of Americano coffee served with a fluffy cloud of cotton coffee hanging over it. The steam rises up from the hot coffee melting the cotton candy and causing it to slowly rain down into the cup in the form of sweet sugar droplets.  At around $9 per serving, Sweet Little Rain isn’t the cheapest cup of coffee money can buy, but if you’re looking to impress your Instagram followers, it’s definitely worth it.

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Inspired by 17th century German monks who allegedly survived on a rich beer called doppelbock during Lent, an Ohio man has embarked on a 46-day beer diet, dropping all solid food until Easter Sunday.

Many Christians choose not to consume beer during Lent, as a way of abstaining for something they find pleasurable, but Dell Hall, the director of sales at Fifty West Brewing Company in Cincinnati, Ohio, is doing the exact opposite. On March 6th, he embarked on a 46-day beer diet, dropping all solid food and getting his nutrients only from beer and vitamin supplements. Although he admits the first few days were rough, Hall claims he now feels amazing and is 25 pounds lighter than when he started.

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Pura Still is being advertised as the first spiked water that doesn’t need bubbles to keep things interesting. It’s still, but definitely not flat as it has an alcohol content of 4.5% by volume.

Alcoholic drink brands have been hard at work trying to come up with new and enticing products for the growing number of health-conscious consumers who like to consume of bit of alcohol from time to time, but hate the calories associated with it. Pura Still is the bet of FIFCO USA, formerly North American Breweries, to capture this important part of the market. It doesn’t have the “annoying carbonated bubbles” that spiked seltzer products are known for, and contains only one gram of sugar and 90 calories. The company describes Pura Still as “the perfect way for consumers to enjoy themselves without straying from their healthy lifestyles”.

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Tulips,  or flowers in general, are not exactly known as prime ingredients for strong spirits, but one small distillery in Holland (where else?) claims to have perfected a process that allows it to create a high quality vodka out of only two ingredients – tulip bulbs and water.

Dutch Tulip Vodka is the creation of 34-year-old Joris Putman, a filmmaker turned entrepreneur. Four years ago, he decided he was going to invent something, and although he didn’t know exactly what that something would be, he was sure it would involve his country’s national symbol, the tulip. Today, after years of hard work, countless experiments and trying to convince others that tulip vodka was actually a thing, Dutch Tulip Vodka is a big hit, and Michelin-star restaurants all over Europe are proud to have it on their menus.

All it took for Putman to come up with the idea of tulip vodka was a suggestion from his friends to make moonshine from grain. He wasn’t going to do something that others had been doing it for thousands of years, but the idea of making a strong spirit out of tulips sounded appealing.

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Visitors at this past weekend’s Car Free Day Festival in Vancouver, British Columbia, had the chance to buy one of the most unusual health food products ever created – unfiltered hot dog water.

Gluten-free, keto-compatible, rich in sodium and electrolytes, and bottled in a sleek glass bottle, unfiltered hot dog water has all the making of a health food craze. And with a hefty cost of $38 per bottle, it even has the price tag to match. Like similar “raw” or “smart” waters available on the market these days, hot dog water comes with a series of supposed health benefits: it’s rich in sodium, which helps your body increase its water intake, helps the drinker lose weight, increase brain function, look younger and increase vitality, and triggers anti-inflammatory processes, making it the perfect post-workout drink. And the cherry on the cake – every bottle contains an actual hot-dog.

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In an attempt to raise awareness about the ability to turn wastewater into safe drinking water, a brewery in Stockholm, Sweden has launched a new beer brand made with recycled sewage water.

Aptly called PU:REST, the new beer crafted by Stockholm’s Nya Carnegiebryggeriet (New Carnegie Brewery) in collaboration with the Swedish Environmental Research Institute (IVL) and Carlsberg is supposed to convince people that “second-hand water” can be as clean as normal tap water. IVL claims that the challenge to get people to drink recycled water is not a technological one, but a psychological one, so what better way to convince consumers of the purity of treated wastewater than using it to create a beer.

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Most alcohol-free beers mimic the real deal almost to perfection, minus the buzz and substituent hangover, which makes them a bit problematic to drink in places where alcohol consumption is frowned upon, like the workplace. But thank to Suntory’s new clear beer, people will just think you’re drinking water.

All Free All Time is a zero-alcohol, zero-calorie beer designed to protect consumers from judgmental attention from bosses coworkers and clients at the workplace. It is completely clear and comes packaged in small plastic bottles which make it look more like a bottle of water than beer. You can take a sip at your desk, while working, or in a meeting, without worrying about attracting unwanted attention to yourself.

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When you think of Mace pepper spray, ‘awesome beer flavor’ is probably not the first thing that comes into your head, but that’s exactly why the adventurous people at Dog Head Brewery decided to create the world’s first mace-flavored beer.

Dogfish Head Brewery is known for sometimes using weird ingredients – from pork scraps to dust from lunar meteorites – to create unique brews, so this collaboration with Mace Security International to create a mouth-numbing beer is not that unusual. Called “In Your Mace!”, the limited edition drink is partially brewed with oleoresin capsicum, the active ingredient in Mace’s pepper spray.

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Despite being a hub for technological advancement, California’s bay area is also notorious for absurd anti-science health trends such as the movement opposing vaccinations which, in 2014, lead to the most significant measles outbreak the state had seen in decades. Joining the absurdity of the “anti-vaxxers” is a new and equally ridiculous trend – “raw water”. That’s actually unfiltered, untreated, raw spring water, which, even when from the seemingly cleanest of sources, can spread diseases like cholera, E. coli, Hepatitis A or Giardia.

To add insult to potential injury, this unsterilized water, bottled and marketed by startups like Live Water, is priced at $36.99 per 2.5-gallon containers and $14.99 per refill at the co-op Rainbow Grocery in San Francisco. The water is often out of stock and typically sees a price hike with every restock.

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