A few decades back, Icelandic authorities felt that a good way to keep the Icelanders from killing themselves with the sauce would be to ban beer.
To ban beer.
The logic went something like this: The Icelanders are hopeless alcoholics. They will drink themselves into a stupor on any given evening. Come morning, they will naturally want the hair of the dog, ergo beer. If we give the Icelanders beer, they will drink it like soda pop, and will be locked forever in a vicious cycle of alcoholism. So we'd better just let them drink hard liquor, to save them from themselves.
Er ... yeah. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to spot the holes in that argument. To exacerbate the problem, in the early 1980s a new fad gripped Iceland: that of English beer pubs, the kind that offer draught. Beer pubs sprouted like mushrooms. The only problem was there was no beer to put on the taps.
But the Icelanders don't die without a plan, as on of the more succinct Icelandic idioms puts it. They came up with the idea of mixing light beer (what the Icelanders calls pilsner and which is around 2 % alcohol) with hard liquor (the wicked Brennivin, or just plain old vodka) and putting it in kegs to be served in tap.