hellbrew

plural hellbrews

1. A horrible liquid mixture.

   While she was heating and churning the hellbrew in a double boiler, her sight began to fade.

   1980, Alfred Bester, Golem¹⁰⁰, New York, N.Y.: Simon and Schuster, →ISBN, page 147

   5 more examples

   The only virtue of tequila, so far as I know, is cheapness. It has no flavour. It stupefies more quickly and more cheaply than any hellbrew I have yet encountered.

   1960, Stephen Lister [pen name; Digby George Gerahty], In Search of Paradise, London: Peter Davies, page 120

   No one has spoken, and indeed written, more fiercely than I against the farmers who bedew their fields with ingenious hellbrews, neither knowing nor caring whether goldfinches will suffer from the shortage of thistles or foxes gorge themselves on unwholesome wood pigeons.

   1965 May 26, Punch, page 778

   “Maybe the stockyards are in Kansas City,” I jabbered, I hardly know why even now. Maybe to imply that the words that had passed since my interjections about Mrs. Clicko’s husband had not actually been spoken, and we had not been catapulted into this little hellbrew, but were still on safe ground, chatting of this and that.

   1983, Peter De Vries, Slouching Towards Kalamazoo, Boston, Mass.; Toronto, Ont.: Little, Brown and Company, →ISBN, page 97

   DRAGON Spirit – the very name conjures up a cheap Chinese hellbrew, the kind of electric soup which is bought with multiples of “the price of a cup of tea”.

   1990 February, Stewart C. Russell, “Dragon Spirit”, in Amiga Computing, page 42

   Next, as we breasted a short, steep rise, an area the size of a small football pitch was revealed on the left of the road containing about fifty ponies and traps with attendant ponymen. The ponymen communicated to each other in a savage, barking tongue that defies translation or transcription. The most significant sensory input was olfactory, an unbelievable stench pervaded the environs, it bore only a remote hint of what might be safely classified as horseshit. The rest was a hellbrew, sinkpit, gasping, gagging, ancient dung history of rot and wet and corruption and decay.

   1994 October–December, The Angry Corrie, number 20, page 13

2. A hellish mess.

   Cheery hellbrew of cops, dames, gats and slugging.

   1952 January 30, Punch, page 186

   4 more examples

   But—known only to a handful of Hasbrouck Heights residents—the shadow of her finger thrusts down through a dozen years to stir two lives into a hellbrew.

   1934 June 19, Bergen Evening Record, volume XXXX, number 12 (total 11478), Hackensack, N.J., page 22

   As frequently used, Fascism signifies anything you want, as long as it is not openly favoring Communism. Communists in Toronto call the Quebec Catholic social program “Fascist,” or to be more precise, a Fascist “hellbrew.”

   1936 October 10, John LaFarge, “Fascism or Communism: Which the Greater Danger?”, in America: A Catholic Review of the Week, volume LVI, number 1, New York, N.Y.: The America Press, page 4

   He’s the chap who cooked up whatever hellbrew has got loose.

   1977, Desmond Bagley, chapter 37, in The Enemy, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., published 1978, page 243

   So died Morgause, witch-queen of Lothian and Orkney, leaving by her death and its manner another hellbrew of trouble for her hated brother.

   1983, Mary Stewart, “The Witch’s Sons”, in The Wicked Day, New York, N.Y.: William Morrow and Company, Inc., →ISBN, section 5, page 234