There's An Ale Made From The Yeast Of Roald Dahl's Chair. No, Seriously
It's rare for a food or drink item to sound both like it was plucked from some futuristic work of science fiction and like it was unearthed from the ancient cellar of a dusty old British pub. But a brew out of the United Kingdom manages just that. It also makes us want to break out the industrial-strength furniture polish.
Mr. Twit's Odious Ale was created in a collaboration between East London's 40FT Brewery and Taproom and the creative studio Bompas and Parr in 2016, the year that the divisive writer Roald Dahl would have turned 100. To mark the occasion, the team acquired permission from the Dahl estate to swab the late "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" scribe's writing chair for what the latter partners identified as "dirt, dust, microbes, and bacteria," or more romantically described as "disgustingly delicious detritus." That detritus also apparently included a bit of yeast, a key ingredient necessary for beer making.
The unusual ingredients were all purportedly combined to create a Polish Grätzer-style ale. (How much of the chair-based component actually made it into the beverage we'll consider with a grain of salt, which you can actually add to cheap beer for better flavor.) Titled, of course, for Dahl's "The Twits," the final product was served, with plenty of advance publicity, at the theater company Les Enfants Terrible's interactive production of "Dinner at the Twits," as though this particular tale needed any more players.
What does the Roald Dahl chair yeast beer taste like, and can you still try it?
The Willy Wonka-worthy stunt suds do not appear to have ever been sold in stores locally in the U.K., and they certainly weren't available in the United States. Neither does it presently appear on the brewery's website. Online retailer The Whisky Exchange lists Mr. Twit's Odious Ale as out of stock at the time of this article's publication. It also describes the stuff only as little more than an oak-smoked wheat beer. Over on the social beer discovery platform Untappd, however, users checking in at 40FT described it as smoky, yes, but also sour and spicy. Others detected notes of citrus, like hints of a radler or a shandy.
The innovators at 40FT, who have been cranking out creative booze since 2015, have been a bit less macabre in their more recent releases. In lieu of old literary corpses, the brewery's latest lagers, hazy pale ales, and schwarzbiers, take inspiration from disco, the Dalston sunrise, and, almost as unbelievable as the Dahl concoction, hotel restaurant roast chicken.