Who says you can’t congratulate a kid too much?
Miss V received so much praise for providing a urine sample on Thursday that this morning she took the second empty sample cup out of the Biohazard bag and filled it up too. She even put it in the fridge.
I don’t think anyone’s allowed to get rid of it. She wouldn’t understand.
Next thing you know she’ll be looking for alternate sample cups—Rubbermaid and Tupperware containers that she can micturate into. The fridge will be full of piss.
Fortunately there’s room because we eliminated some near-piss last night. I know, I know—that sounds harsh—but every once in a while a beer gains entry into LBHQ that is almost undrinkable. (And then I drink it strictly to take care of tremors.)
The beer in question was Van Diest FRÜLI, a strawberry Belgian white fruit beer ringing in at 4.1% alcohol. Ordinarily I wouldn’t be grateful to my dad for buying only one bottle of beer, but in this case it would have been tragic to multiply the $2.45 FRÜLI price tag by more than 1.
We went through a fruit beer phase a little while ago with the UNIBROUE sampler pack, which, while a good primer on Belgian-style high-gravity brews, is nevertheless an acquired taste. For drinkers who tend to choose easy-drinking ales and lagers, a beer like MAUDITE, with its bottle-fermented orchard overripeness, can be overwhelming. But it is still a beer. However cloying its fruity characteristics may seem, it is hoppy, grainy, and malty. FRÜLI, on the other hand, is a complete departure from beer.
For one thing, it’s cloudy maroon. There’s no mistaking the strawberry component; the stuff smells stronger than a Strawberry Shortcake doll’s hair. It could compete with strawberry Jell-O or Kool-Aid (powders that should rightly be combined with vodka). Without even taking a sip, you know this beer is not right.
If you’re also an alcoholic, you’ll probably want to pound your bottle of FRÜLI. Classic WYSIWYG: smell and taste line up exactly in an uncomplicated strawberry assault. Let me quote Meet Strawberry Shortcake:
Soon the girls were loading the pink wagon with cookies. Strawberry Shortcake was berry, berry happy—not just to have cookies, but a new friend as well!
OMFG!!! Arghhhhh!!! Drinking a 250mL FRÜLI is like reading 250 pages of Strawberry Shortcake! It’s sappy, sweet, cloying, insipid, and candy-like. Its lack of resemblance to beer is offensive, people. Not even its weak alcohol content redeems it.
Now, perhaps I’ve had a bit more exposure to Strawberry Shortcake than some people. Fact is, if you like fruit but don’t care much for beer, you could drink FRÜLI. You could also put a scoop of Ben ‘n’ Jerry’s in it and call it a float, but it’s not a beer, dammit.
But it gets worse, my fellow inebriates. I visited Beer Advocate to see what my fellow reviewers think of FRÜLI. One of them said it was…sessionable.
That’s because you’d have to drink a CASE of FRÜLI to get drunk. You could get more punch-drunk reading a marathon session of Strawberry Shortcake books to two enraptured little girls, all the while questioning your parental judgment in letting them absorb such mind-numbing rubbish, than you could drinking FRÜLI.
The only thing that upsets me more than FRÜLI is…O’DOUL’S.
FRÜLI is the first beer I’m not sad to see vacate our fridge. It is not welcome back there! Miss V can put ten pee samples in there for all I care, but another FRÜLI …shudder.
Liquorstore Bear 
Will make sure to avoid this beverage. Another important post for your fellow inebriates.
As for pee in the fridge? Lucky bastard! Spent part of my weekend going through an ENORMOUS trailer full of last year’s Burning Man junk…including several jugs of -you guessed it- piss. Some people are inconsiderate a-holes. If you need to piss in the middle of the night at The Burn -and don’t want to make the bike ride or walk to the porta-potties then jugs are the norm.
Point is, you’re supposed to carry the liquid to the potties and dump ’em out the next morning. Not add them to the bar/camp trash -shudder-.
Fermented no less. Not that I would get close enough -even with gloves and a pitchfork- to find out.
At least the kid has an excuse.
Blahh, OMG! that is totally sick. That reminds me of how truck drivers piss in Gatorade bottles and chuck them out the window as they drive down the highway. You never want to pick up a Gatorade bottle from a ditch and say, “Oh yum, free lemon Gatorade.” Especially since Gatorade doesn’t name its drinks fruity names; it uses abstractions like “waterfall splash” or in the case of truckers’ pee bottles, maybe “golden shower.”