Crimes of passion

I'm kind of a cheap drunk. I'll qualify that with a bit of context. I get inordinate amounts of satisfaction from buying good beer on special - second possibly only to consuming the stuff. We've been down this path on a few occasions here at the World of Bollocks eg here and here but suffice to say Cheap Beer (esp. Grolsch) = WIN on a multitude of levels. The pursuit of good beer for fewer shekhels, as well as man's instinct for fart-arsing around in experimentation, led myself and the good Dr Craigos into home brewing for quite a few years. And of course one was once much more of an equal-opportunity drunk, enjoying cheap booze of all persuasions - from Kirov vodka to Black Douglas scotch - until overindulgence in all of the above resulted in a steadfast policy of never drinking anything you can run a lawnmower on, which has served me well since then.

There was one lapse, though. One single, solitary, regrettable lapse. One night in 2002, deep into winter, when the beer fridge at Chateau Dodgy Evolution III (downstairs in the garage-slash-kicking-back-area, and comfortably larger than the real fridge upstairs in the kitchen) had run dry and none of our recent brews had matured near enough to drinkability, myself, Dr Craigos and the King of Seed plumbed the depths of despair.

We cracked open the bottle of Passion Pop someone had left in the fridge since our housewarming in January.

OK, some clarification. Passion Pop, for those who came in late, is an icon of the Australian drinking landscape, basically the cheapest of cheap nasty white wine varieties - the tailings from the bottling plant that not even the cask wine makers will touch - mixed with artificial sickly-sweet passionfruit flavouring and carbonated to fuck. The beverage du jour of the underage and the undiscerning, particularly in the days before RTDs were invented, and particularly for those for whom the usual teeny-pisshead combo of Southern Comfort and Coke was too confronting. Passion Pop had the advantage of being able to be purchased with spare change and for the amount of alcohol dispensed per swig was astonishingly cheap. One hoped though that one's recent main meals were similarly inexpensive as they'd inevitably go to waste, in a gutter, in a skip, down the front of one's Cup Day racewear, or down the front of one's date to same.


Despite this, or maybe even because of it, Passion Pop holds a precious place in the cavalcade of regret that constitutes the rites of passage of pre-twenties drinking in Australia. As illustrated by a bit of Gasket (Our Year 12 Formal Was At The Evans Head Bowlo):

Miss the girls from my old school days
Didn't care from where you came
So long as you brought the Passion Pop
And vaguely recalled their name...

I should also clarify that our rogue Passion Popper wasn't just 'someone'. 'Someone' suggests randomness, drunkenness, perhaps an excuse for such abrogation of intellectual competency. It suggests someone momentarily bereft of their faculties, someone not in the best of judgement, perhaps someone too young and silly to know better. Not a 25 year old PhD student from Tasphobia who'd go on to postdoc at Cambridge and have an astonishingly shiny research career on his return to Oz. He was (and remains) a terribly good bloke. Just with a breathtakingly cheap palate.

Anyhoo, by winter the nights had fair drawn in, times were desperate and our magnum of Passion Pop became the last chance for alcoholic sustenance short of actually going out and finding a bottle shop open at 9pm on a Wednesday night. Fuck that. Despite being long-term hard-bitten pissheads, none of us had actually tried the shit before - cheap beer and cheaper spirits were more our go in our younger days - so there was a hint of novelty, maybe even adventure to the prospect. So we cracked the Passion Pop - fake ribbed-plastic champagne 'cork' and all - and had a go at it.

JESUS SUFFERING FUCK WAS IT AWFUL.

A full frontal sensory assault of sulphites, cough medicine and acid-etching fizz, with a lingering soupcon of arse on the back palate. It tasted like Passiona that Oliver Reed had done wees in after a particularly hefty between-gigs session at the Goat & Dirigible. Had a kick on it though, like a mule with Tabasco on its gronnicks. I think the hangover arrived slightly before the second sip. In short, it was patently the worst thing I'd ever consumed in the course of competitive university drinking, and that included the punch at the Hovel that Uber Flatmate Jase made entirely from inferior grade spirits, orange cordial and Wizz Fizz, and the home brew that went brutally feral because Seeds had filled the brew vessel up from the hose which had been sitting in the garden in full sun for three weeks.

So after we finished off the rest of the Passion Pop, we dug out the two-week-old homebrew and stuffed a sixer in the freezer...

The Doctor is OUT.