World’s strongest beer packaged in “road kill”

I’m not sure which is more exciting, the news that Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir “Eat, Pray, Love” has inspired a line of perfume or the news that Francis Fukuyama’s treatise “The End of History” has inspired a beer.

Not just any beer, but the world’s strongest (55 percent alcohol by volume) and most expensive (500 pounds a bottle). As if that weren’t enough, it comes encased in a taxidermized squirrel, hare or stoat. All the animals are reconditioned roadkill. Some, apparently, come dressed in tartan.

As a wag of my acquaintance said, “If this isn’t the end of history, I don’t know what is.”

According to the manufacturer, BrewDog of Fraserburgh, Scotland, their product is to beer what democracy is to history: “Fukuyama defined history as the evolution of the political system and traced this through the ages until we got the Western Democratic paradigm. For Fukuyama this was the end point of man’s political evolution and consequently the end of history. The beer is the last high ABV beer we are going to brew, the end point of our research into how far we can push the boundaries of extreme brewing, the end of beer.”

Fukuyama, who has written about his love of woodworking but has no known background in home-brewing, does not seem to have commented on this startling development. But Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic reports in his blog that “in addition to getting you very drunk very quickly, scientists claim that ‘The End of History’ also creates in its consumers ambivalent thoughts about the efficacy of state-building.”