by Cecil Morris
Get a load of this: Columbia, Breakside unveil beer made from bear poop" —Oregon Public Broadcasting, January 28, 2026.
Bear scat—that’s bear crap
to those of us not naturalists
or bearded survivalists wise
in the euphemisms of nature
(or ursinus faeces if you
prefer the snooty gloss of Latin
or Pooh poop if you’re still child-like
and delighted by certain sounds).
Bear scat beer—a new lager called
Nature Calls—is a wild brew infused
with—dare I say it—shit collected
in Montana, the big sky state,
where a new breed of ranchers scour
the land for the not-quite-gold gold
and sell it to be fermented.
I suppose the USDA
does not inspect or certify
for purity the scat in vats
of yellow lager so you might
be getting a foragers blend
of deer droppings or raccoon turds.
Does that matter? The real question:
Would Norm drink it were it on tap?
or bearded survivalists wise
in the euphemisms of nature
(or ursinus faeces if you
prefer the snooty gloss of Latin
or Pooh poop if you’re still child-like
and delighted by certain sounds).
Bear scat beer—a new lager called
Nature Calls—is a wild brew infused
with—dare I say it—shit collected
in Montana, the big sky state,
where a new breed of ranchers scour
the land for the not-quite-gold gold
and sell it to be fermented.
I suppose the USDA
does not inspect or certify
for purity the scat in vats
of yellow lager so you might
be getting a foragers blend
of deer droppings or raccoon turds.
Does that matter? The real question:
Would Norm drink it were it on tap?
 |
| Norm superimposed on Breakside.com screenshot. |
Cecil Morris, a retired high school English teacher, has poems appearing in The 2River View, the Common Ground Review, The New Verse News, Rust + Moth, and elsewhere. His debut poetry collection At Work in the Garden of Possibilities (Main Street Rag) came out in 2025. He and his wife, mother of their children, divide their year between the cool coast of Oregon and the relatively hot Central Valley of California.
