I tried the world’s worst drink

I am standing in a sunny courtyard in the little town of Gijduvan, waiting for a drink. Just in case you don’t know, Gijduvan is a way station on the old Silk Road, in the far west of Uzbekistan: it is known for ceramics, Sufi mystics and loud celebrations of the Persian spring festival, Nowruz.

As part of this festival, the locals make a special soup/beverage called sumalak. The recipe, I’m told, dates to Zoroastrian times – more than 3,000 years ago – and includes “wheat sprouts,” “cottonseed oil” and, I am not joking, “stones.” I can already see the sumalak bubbling away in a vast steel pot. It looks like viscous brown cow slurry. To be honest, I’m not brimming with eagerness. And so, to pass the time as I wait to try this probably horrible drink, I find myself pondering the taxonomy of horrible drinks. What, exactly, are the worst drinks in the world?

Finally, we come to the mindbenders. The mad alcohols. Here, I have quite wide personal experience

Broadly speaking, they fall into three camps. First the “traditional” or national drinks: beloved locally, baffling to outsiders. Then the medicinal concoctions – tonics, tinctures and toxic herbal brews. And finally, the bruisers: drinks where taste is deemed irrelevant so long as they get you smashed. It’s in that last category that I genuinely believe I can name the very worst drink in the world. But before we reach that nadir, let’s begin with the native horrors.

The worst “local” drink I’ve ever had is chicha. This is a time-honored refresher imbibed across South America, but especially in the rainforests of Peru, Brazil and beyond. It can be made from maize, or maybe manioc, cassava or peanuts. In its fermented style it is essentially beer – and that’s how I tried it, when it was handed to me in a big mug by a smiling friend in a brilliantly exotic market, in the Peruvian Amazon jungle city of Iquitos.

What’s so bad about that – a nice cold beer in a hot, sweaty jungle? After watching me down the drink, my friend casually explained how chicha is traditionally made. In short: the maize is chewed by old ladies, who then spit the masticated wads into a bucket. Naturally occurring enzymes in human saliva do the work of breaking the starches into fermentable sugars – thus creating alcohol. Cleverly, my friend waited until I’d swallowed the last drop of old-lady-spit-beer before revealing all this. Otherwise, I too might have asked for a bucket.

Can anything rival chicha in this category? One obvious contender is kumiss, the central Asian staple made by fermenting mare’s milk. This seems to be either loved or hated. Mainly hated. Then there’s pulque, the ancient agave drink of Mexico. A well-traveled friend once described this as tasting like “a frogspawn smoothie.” We should also give an honorable mention to yak butter tea – a salty, smoky mixture of black tea and, well, yak butter.

Onward to the health drinks. In this column we place all those bracing fluids that usually come from odd parts of Europe. Jägermeister is the best known, but there are many more. One friend swears that Riga Black Balsam is appalling. Others claim that Chicago’s Malört is the Voldemort of revivers; a famous description says it has “the aroma and flavor of an open grave.” Nor should we forget all the mineral waters from spas that taste of salt or sulfur – why do we believe that the worse a health drink tastes, the healthier it must be? I am told “Franz Josef Bitter Water” is the nadir in this category. At least the branding is honest.

Finally, we come to the mindbenders. The mad alcohols. Here I have quite a wide-ranging personal experience. It was I, for instance, that invented the cocktail known as a Grapple. This is three shots of grappa mixed with a cold can of Red Bull (themselves two of the worst drinks in the world). I contrived it on a hot day in Venice when I simultaneously wanted something cold, something to pick me up and something to get me hammered. It’s vile, as you expect, but after three Grapples I was ready to swim the Grand Canal.

A quick poll of friends produces many contenders in this intoxicant category. Limoncello. Nigerian-brewed export Guinness. Fernet-Branca. “American beer 20 years ago.” Korean Soju (I can vouch for this being repulsive). Chinese Baijiu. Ayahuasca.

Julian complained that he’d woken up cold and alone, with a goat chewing at his camera

However, I know of one drink which can trump all these. It’s called “posh.” My one and only encounter with posh went like this. I was in Chiapas State in southern Mexico with a friend, Julian. One Sunday we visited an indigenous village called San Juan Chamula. When we got there, they were having a festival outside their weird church (where they seemed to be worshipping the sun). They were also serving posh – a brutal wood alcohol decanted from steel drums into old Coke bottles. So we bought a few, for pennies each, and drank them and got dangerously drunk in around five minutes. At that point I started doing a solo dance routine in the town square.

Soon after this we both lapsed into a booze-induced coma and I woke up at about 6 p.m. as it was getting dark. Julian seemed to be dead alongside me, so I left him and fled on the last truck. As I escaped, I told people the problem – “My friend is dead” – but I got the Spanish wrong and was saying “My friend is Death.” Which didn’t help.

Happily, Julian showed up three hours later complaining that he’d woken up cold and alone, with a goat chewing at his camera, and that I’d “left him for dead.” I wasn’t in a position to argue. Indeed, the whole experience was not edifying – but it was, I believe, an encounter with the worst drink in the world. Because I’ve later learned that this Mexican moonshine regularly kills people.

And what about the sumalak? Here in Gijduvan I have reached the end of the line. The nice Uzbek lady fills my little cup with the esoteric Zoroastrian beverage. I sip it, warily. It tastes very old, very strange, very malty, not very nice – and about a million times better than posh.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s July 2025 World edition.