Round the World in 20 Drinks: The Animal Kingdom

This booze-soaked research trip around the world has taken us many strange and unexpected places, and we’ve all seen some crazy stuff. We say this by way of setting up this next sentence, as it’s hard to know if you’ll quite believe it. Here goes.

There is a brewery which makes beer for dogs.

Actually, scratch that. There are three breweries which produce beer for our canine chums. There’s the old mainstay of the doggy drinking scene, Belgium’s Lucky Dog, with its fetching red bottle and added Vitamin D (because if your dog is drinking you’d like him to get something out of it). Then there’s Bowser Beer, who offer the option of custom labels with your mutt’s face on them. Dog beer, with your dog’s face on the side. 

The plucky young upstart in the field we swear we haven’t just made up is Dawg Grog. Dawg Grog has genuine brewing pedigree, as it’s the brainchild of staff at Oregon’s Boneyard Brewery. Yes, the name of the brewery is just a coincidence. We should point out at this point that neither of these ‘beers’ contain any alcohol - the Grog for instance is made from vegetable broth and spent grain from the brewing process, and Bowser Beer proudly boasts that it contains “chicken or beef.” However, they do all contain barley or an equivalent malt, so at least your dog will smell like he or she is drunk. Authentic.

And if your dog doesn’t like beer, they can have a nice glass of wine. Yep, not even joking. Bark Vineyards produce wine for dogs. Wine. For dogs. It’s made of livers and other dog food fodder, comes in red and white imitation flavours, and it genuinely exists. Pour it over your pup’s dinner, or get them a cheeky wee glass and some crackers while we appear to be disregarding any sense of sanity.

But if you just don’t like animals, and happen to have a wad of cash that you desperately need to get rid of, try to get your hands on one of Brewdog’s taxidermied stoats. The beer inside - The End of History - may be too strong to possibly be pleasant, and a bottle will set you back a pretty penny, but your attention is what the furry bottle-holders would have wanted. That or to go for a pint with the dogs...