Dwarven alcoholic drink with a fiery kick, unique to Iron Mountain.

Drûm is a notorious Oresh drink. As an alcoholic spirit per se, it is unremarkable—a hard liquor of middling proof, made by distilling mead. What makes drûm truly unique is something that’s mixed in after distillation: tiny fire elementals.

Technically known as “elementites”, and nearly invisible with the naked eye, these miniscule bits of living flame are totally lacking in sentience, awareness, or anything but the most basic instinctual drives. Individually very weak, fire elementites would not normally be able to exist within a watery medium. Drûm, however, contains certain herbal additives—flavorless, odorless, and harmless to most humanoids (gnomes excepted)—that put the elementites to “sleep” (that is, cause them to become quiescent, and cool down to a smolder—just hot enough to give drûm its trademark bubbly appearance). These additives break down on contact with saliva, and the elementites “wake up” just as the drink is swallowed—only to die almost immediately, in dramatic fashion, perishing in tiny explosions of flame that vaporize the surrounding liquid and send clouds of drûm vapor back up into the imbiber’s mouth and nasal cavities. Intense inebriation follows almost instantly, as the alcohol is absorbed through the mucuous membranes of the nose and mouth. While perfectly safe for anyone in good health (or for dwarves of any description), drinking drûm is inadvisable for non-dwarves who are elderly or otherwise in poor health (especially anyone with a weak heart).

Drûm is fantastically expensive, as the process of making it is known only by a few specialized brewers (and never revealed to anyone outside of Oros-Kain), and the final product must be drunk shortly after the elementites are added (making it impossible to export). For those unable to afford the real thing (or unwilling to travel to Iron Mountain for the unique experience of drinking it), imitation “drûm” exists, which lacks the critical ingredient—the elementites—and instead substitutes extracts from hot peppers or the like; such faux-drûm, if served properly hot, is claimed to be fairly close to the real thing; but no one who has had a tumbler of real Iron Mountain drûm would support any such claim.