Getting drunk on a tight budget is practically a rite of passage. Just about all of us have some tale to tell about nights spent getting shitfaced on Olde English 800 or some equally putrid swill. But party all the time as we might, it's doubtful any of us have stories that involve being so broke, we had to resort to throwing down any of this. If we had, we'd likely not have lived to talk about it. Advertisement

5 Tharra Continue Reading Below Advertisement Nothing about tharra, a home-brewed alcohol native to India, sounds too bad at all. Granted, its 90 percent alcohol content will end your shit, but that's the point of homemade alcohol, right? But unlike other homemade swills you'll read about later, tharra is rarely mixed with other less drinkable alcohols to improve its potency. It is simply made by fermenting the mash of sugar cane pulp in large ceramic containers. It sounds kind of delicious really, and it may very well be at first.

And you can drink it right out of a bag! But before you go dipping into that bottle of finely-aged tharra that grandma brought back from her trip to India during her days as a high school floozy, there's something you should know. Unlike other spirits, whiskey for example, tharra doesn't benefit from aging. In fact, let it sit long enough and it turns from barely consumable alcohol into full on poison. Continue Reading Below Advertisement But if the numbers are any indication, a little copper formaldehyde poisoning isn't going to stop anyone from getting their drink on, because tharra continues to kill hundreds of people each year. Just last September in the Pakistani city of Karachi, 22 men died after drinking tharra from an illegal brewery run by a police constable. And why were they drinking tharra when regular old alcohol is plenty legal in Pakistan? For the same reason any of us would have. It was the middle of the holy month of Ramadan and the liquor stores were closed.

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