There has never been as grim a beer as Wild Buck. It may be marketed as some sort of salt of the earth, deep country beer, but the reality is it’s just a mixture of sludge dredged from the bottom of the Waikato, and fermented deer piss. It is feral. If you are ever unlucky enough to find yourself in an establishment that serves exclusively Wild Buck on tap, first of all, you should run away in horror. But if you were to be brave enough to order a jug, the atmosphere of this pub will no doubt inspire you to drink it quickly, which is bad news when you have a jug of Wild Buck.
Upon the first sip of your dirty, foamy and questionably opaque jug, you will experience a sort of cognitive dissonance. You believe you are drinking beer, but your taste buds send the message to your brain that you are in fact imbibing muddy piss-water. For a moment, this is a unique and almost pleasant experience, but as Wild Buck hits the back of the tongue, survival instincts kick in, and your gag reflex will become difficult to suppress. Suppress it you must, because if you find yourself in dire enough straits to be voluntarily consuming Wild Buck, you are not in a good place mentally, emotionally, or physically. Desperate times call for desperate measures, like Bear Grylls drinking his own piss. Except his piss probably tasted better.
While served in bottle form, it is unlikely anyone has ever thought it necessary to prolong their suffering by pouring Wild Buck out into a glass. But they should, because it is only when you witness the swirling oily froth of a Wild Buck that you can truly comprehend the atrocious quality of the beverage. In jug form, this horror is amplified by the sheer amount of foam the drink produces when poured. It is as if, upon learning that the fermentation of deer piss did not create the desired fizziness, the brewers simply added Pam’s dishwashing liquid into the mix to simulate froth. As such, even though a jug of Wild Buck may seem cheap on paper, if you account for the beer that remains trapped in the immense layer of foul-tasting foam that coats the bottom of your jug and glass, half the jug is undrinkable.
There may be some people however who, when faced with a staggering selection of superior ales and lagers, nevertheless argue that price justifies the abomination that is Wild Buck. This is a fair argument. With Putin’s escapades driving up grain prices, beer prices are reaching all-time highs, so it is reasonable to assume a beverage made with excrement and mud-derived elements would be able to undercut its grain-based brethren. But this is not the case. In reality, a box of Wild Buck usually sits at about 24 dollars these days. As a 4 percent knuckle-dragger with 15 bottles in a box, Wild Buck comes in at a whopping 1.6 dollars per standard, which almost amounts to a war crime. That joke may be in bad taste, but hey, so is Wild Buck.
As with many terrible beers in New Zealand, Wild Buck tries to cover up how bad it is by marketing itself as a humble, down to earth brew. This fails for two reasons. First because it is shit, and second, because that shittiness is not even reflected in its dollar-per-standard rate. The only possible justification for someone buying Wild Buck is a hostage-like situation in which you are confined to a pub and the only choice is between Wild Buck and something even more disgusting, like Tui.
Tasting notes: dishwashing liquid, urine.
Froth level: stepping in dog shit.
Tastes like: the floor of a DOC hut.
Overall rating: 1/10 rock bottom.