Squirrel beer, ant gin and poop wine

Alcohol in the museum exhibit had to be considered drinkable somewhere in the world, even if some would be put off by an offensive taste, odor "or the background of how it's made," Ahrens said. For example, a rice wine called Ttongsul, once used as a medicinal remedy in South Korea, is brewed with fermented human feces. "The thought alone is enough to get most people to gag," Ahrens said. Unsurprisingly, this so-called poop wine "smells horribly bad during production,"

Whale testicle beer, a seasonal product produced by Brewery Steðji in Iceland, incorporates testicles "that are cured according to an old, Icelandic tradition, lightly salted and then smoked," brewery co-owner Dagbjartur Arilíusson told Icelandic news site Vísir in 2015. "We put a lot of effort into this and it's a long process," he said.

And Anty Gin — each bottle steeped with about 62 red wood ants (Formica rufa), is the world's first gin brewed with insects, according to manufacturer Cambridge Distillery. The ants lend "sharp citrus notes" to the beverage, the product website says. 

It's probably just as well that visitors can only look at the exhibit's alcoholic beverages, and not taste them. However, Ahrens did sample "as many as possible" while researching the drinks; he tasted "almost all of the rest" by the time the exhibit opened. 

In fact, four of the alcoholic beverages on display were manufactured by the museum: Korean feces wine; chicha, an ancient beer made from corn that is chewed into paste before fermenting; pruno, a prison wine made from fruit and brewed in a toilet; and a potent Ugandan moonshine that British colonizers dubbed "war gin."

"The only one I can't bring myself to trying is the poo wine," Ahrens admitted. "It's just messing with my head."