An impoverished student flat South East London early 1980s
Out of Halls, into grown up digs and male. Sweet liberty and economic necessity demand a certain ingenuity regarding intoxicants. Basically, since this predates Tesco pretty much giving beer away, it's grow your own horrible weed and brew your own horrible alcohol time.

A large pvc tub of sugar, instant beer crap and yeast takes up resisdence in the airing cupboard and the resulting concoction is given the minimum possible fermentation time. It tastes as horrible as you would expect and does terrible things to the bowels but it does contain ethanol. It gets drunk and so do the housemates.

In the early days, as often happens, the default state of the acccommodation is set to party and a constant flow of people come and go. Weekends are the worst but usually some relatively unknown friend of a friend will be drinking, smoking and crashing.

Cutting a long story short, one of these occasional overstayers vouchsafed the fact that on a previous visit some weeks earlier he was unable to resist temptation and adulterated the homebrew with his piss. Sobriety and conscience, or perhaps a desire to see the reaction prompted a confession. Too little too late, no vintage brews here.

It didn't actually taste any worse than the usual beer sans piss as it turned out
(unclestinky, Wed 12 Jan 2011, 1:15, Reply)