Introducing the Sourtoe Cocktail, Made with a Real Human Toe
Source – It sounds like something out of a horror film: You’re enjoying a glass of local bourbon after a long day. You take a swig, when something grazes your lips. It’s not an ice cube, it’s not a lemon wedge — it’s none other than a human toe. Introducing the very real, very questionable Sourtoe Cocktail. …
This dreadful drink can be found at the Sourdough Saloon, a bar in Dawson City’s Downtown Hotel, located in Yukon, Canada — and the concoction has been around since the 1970s.
The gnarly garnishes featured in the Sourtoe Cocktail are dehydrated and pickled, then stored in salt. The drink itself is just a shot of whiskey. …
The Sourdough Saloon usually gets the Sourtoe Cocktail toes from people who’ve lost them to frostbite, lawnmower accidents or surgery, according to The Canadian Press. Apparently, the bar is always open to donations since a handful of toes have been stolen or swallowed over the years.
On a positive note, if you were going to have any part of the human anatomy served to you in a cocktail, I suppose a toe would be the one you’d pick. As you run down a mental list of body parts you could have – an eyeball, a tongue, a liver, a penis – having a toe in your drink is getting off more or less easy.
On a negative note, let me explain the existence of the Sourtoe Cocktail. There’s something just intrinsically hard-wired into the human brain that makes us want to dare each other to do gross shit like this. I don’t get it. I can’t justify it. But I acknowledge it. It’s why we have things like blood sausage. Or Haggis, which is made with sheep intestines. Bull testicles breaded and fried to make you think they’re delicious and wholesome chicken tenders. Or half the items in the mystery box on any cooking show. The Irish Rose is a big watcher of Chopped, and last week they had the chefs cook pig face. Which, in case you thought that’s a clever nickname, is in fact the face of a pig.
I mean, just because you can eat or drink a thing doesn’t mean you should. But it’s deep in our psyche to do exactly that. It’s why they put worms at the bottom of tequila bottles. I have a cousin who went to Thailand and brought back a bottle of unidentified booze with a full goddamned cobra inside. And other cousins I go deep sea fishing with and when you catch a tuna you’re expected to take a bite out its heart. Like the Sourtoe, it’s a tradition. A terrible, gross tradition that serves some bizarre, instinctive purpose I can’t make sense of. So just because some bored, sun-deprived, drunken Canuck driving his AMC Pacer to the bar during the Nixon administration plops his frostbitten toe into his whiskey, and now 50 years later in a gluten free, non-GMO, peanut allergy world, we’re all expected to do likewise. It’s deranged.
All that said, I know myself well enough to know if I was at the Sourdough Saloon, I’d end up ruining a perfectly good bourbon with some asshole’s frozen toe. I’d be the guy who couldn’t say no to this abomination. Which is all the more incentive, like I needed it, to stay the hell out of the Yukon.