Would You Drink a Beer That Was Made With Yeast From Belly Buttons?

Whether we're talking about an adrenaline-fueled soccer mom's inexplicable ability to lift up a car in the face of tragedy or an Oklahoma man who has sewn change pockets into his wrinkly ankles, the human form is truly a triumph of biological ingenuity and evolution.

Case in point: One Australian brewery has just taken it upon themselves to embrace the inky abyss of the human abdomen by brewing a beer that actually utilizes the brewer's own belly button lint.

Belly Button Beer is the latest beer from the Melbourne-based 7 Cent Brewery, and as the name suggests, it uses one hell of an unlikely ingredient in the fermentation process: belly button fluff. Or to be more precise, the yeast present in said belly button fluff.

How does one make beer out of belly button detritus? We thought you'd never ask. According to the brewery, "The process of isolating our own yeast strain involved swabbing samples of each of the brewer's belly buttons and getting our full science on by streaking out the samples on agar plates. After allowing the plates to incubate, we found all sorts of interesting things growing, including what appeared to be colonies of yeast."

If you are not gagging yet, please continue: "Positive controls were used to help us identify yeast colonies and negative controls were used to ensure our techniques were sterile." A little relief there—the techniques were sterile, so they say.

To continue: "We selected individual yeast colonies and grew them up until we had pitchable quantities for trial batches. Tasting the sample batches from each brewer was great fun and we selected the one that we thought had the best character as our GABS beer. We then grew the selected yeast strain to a pitchable quantity for an 800-liter batch." Who was the winning brewer with the most savory belly button cells? We may never know. 7 Cent Brewery isn't saying.

And what does belly-button-derived beer taste like? "The yeast exhibits qualities of Belgian beer, with the key characteristics being spiciness, clove, and light banana esters."

Well, then.

MUNCHIES reached out to 7 cent Brewery to try to find out a bit more about the response the beer has received. They told us the following: "It's been quite a mixed response between people that are refusing to try it and those that are willing to give it a go for the hilarity that it is."

The beer itself may be divisive, but it's certainly clear just how much of 7-Cent's time and effort went into Belly Button Beer. After all, it's like the brewery says: "There will be a little bit of 7 Cent in every glass." Literally.