rotgut

rotgut

1. noun A liquor that is particularly strong, inexpensive, and inferior in quality, especially whiskey or rum. I don't know how you can drink that rotgut all the time. Just a couple shots were enough to make me sick as a dog! Don't be a cheapskate and load up on rotgut for the party. Let's actually enjoy what we're drinking tonight!
2. adjective Used as a modifier to describe such a liquor. He showed up to the party with a liter of rotgut whiskey, and several of us were puking our guts out by the time we were finished. That's the last time I drink rotgut vodka. I've got the worst headache of my entire life this morning!
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.

rotgut

1. n. strong or inferior liquor, especially whiskey. (Folksy.) The old man nearly went blind drinking all that rotgut.
2. mod. [of liquor] strong or fiery. You’ve got to stop drinking that rotgut liquor and think of your health.
3. n. weak or otherwise inferior beer. She can afford something better, but she drinks nothing but cheap rotgut.
McGraw-Hill's Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions
See also:
  • junk
  • Junk it!
  • angle
  • angling
  • juice
  • juiced
  • belt
  • belted
  • belting
References in periodicals archive
James Joyce would have preferred a choice of brandies in decanters made by Tiffany's, but rotgut was the shortcut to epiphanies.
When the master went away, I figured he was playing poker somewhere or belting back a bottle of rotgut in a Cibola speakeasy.
To be sure, the God of Lewis Nordan's Arrow Catcher County, Mississippi, wakes each morning with an enormous hangover, takes a shot of rotgut whiskey for the cure and chases it down with an ice-cold Co-Cola.
These books are welcome relief from a recent wave of revisionist rotgut. The Drug Enforcement Administration's website proclaims that "Prohibition did work" (the DEA's emphasis), while ignoring the ban's effect on violent crime.
Three days on the road seems a little early to start hitting the rotgut liquor, but this foursome--Matt Wood on drums, Bobby Froese and Sunny Dhak on guitar, and Mike Payette on bass--left more than their homes in East Vancouver, Canada, when they embarked on their United States tour.
"For so long, tequila was crap, junk, rotgut liquor.
At base is cachaca, which can be anything from rotgut to well-aged cane alcohol.
All the techniques that go into the creation of good wine, beer and fine liquors (without which I'd be swilling the rotgut poteen of my ancestors instead of the champagne I plan to drink in celebration of this New Year).
The men from the record companies (invariably white northerners) set up their primitive machines (with the recording going straight on to needle-cut wax discs), uncorked bottles of rotgut liquor and let it be known that they would listen to alomers from the black community.
So we decided to get together through a new common project, Randlords and Rotgut, and launch a nonracial ensemble.
After all, the whole lime/salt ritual was originally meant to mask the taste of rotgut tequila.
A joint on the weekend is the moral equivalent of a twenty-four-hour-a-day crack habit; wine with meals is next door to a daily quart of rotgut. The stigmatizing of addicts, casual users, alcoholics, social drinkers and smokers makes punitive measures against them palatable.