Whisky may be traditionally made from the standard ingredients of barley and water, but one man has created a whisky made from diabetics’ urine. Just what the doctor ordered, right?
While the thought of drinking whisky made from urine may turn your stomach ever so slightly, just know that the urine is purified. In other words, a chemical process is used to take out the sugar and then added to the mash stock. Diabetics were chosen to donate urine to the project because of the high amount of sugar that they excrete in their urine.
Unfortunately for those wanting to drink the whisky urine, it won’t be available at your local liquor store any time soon. James Gilphin, who is the genius researcher who invented the strange concoction, views the whisky urine as more of an art project than a beverage. According to Gilphin, he created the whisky urine more to see if it is, “plausible to suggest that we start utilizing our water purification systems in order to harvest the biological resources that our elderly already process in abundance."
Gilphin claims that urine whisky is not a do-it-yourself project because there are obviously more “clean lab” techniques needed when urine is involved. It should also be noted that diabetics should not drink the whisky as it is too high in sugar for diabetics to consume.
Gilphin Family Whisky can be viewed at the upcoming AND Festival, which is is being touted as a festival for “anarchists of the imagination.”
This writer had the opportunity to interview Gilphin about the process of making whisky from the urine, but wasn’t brave enough to taste any of the urine samples.
Gilphin is not the first person to think up the idea of drinking urine. In fact, urine can be drunk to prevent dehydration when there is nothing else available to drink. That doesn’t mean that it’s drinking urine is necessarily the best strategy on a daily basis because any drugs that are in the system are excreted through the urine as well. Drinking urine also wouldn’t work long in preventing dehydration because if you aren’t drinking anything but urine, your kidneys will not produce as much urine.
I’ve also heard of people drinking urine both as a strange sexual fetish and as for health purposes, but like the writer who was too terrified by the thought of drinking Gilphin Family Whisky because of its strange ingredient, I am not all that drinking urine.
Would you ever drink whisky made from urine?