  We present a new prescription for analysing cosmological perturbations in a
more-general class of scalar-field dark-energy models where the energy-momentum
tensor has an imperfect-fluid form. This class includes Brans-Dicke models,
f(R) gravity, theories with kinetic gravity braiding and generalised galileons.
We employ the intuitive language of fluids, allowing us to explicitly maintain
a dependence on physical and potentially measurable properties. We demonstrate
that hydrodynamics is not always a valid description for describing
cosmological perturbations in general scalar-field theories and present a
consistent alternative that nonetheless utilises the fluid language. We apply
this approach explicitly to a worked example: k-essence non-minimally coupled
to gravity. This is the simplest case which captures the essential new features
of these imperfect-fluid models. We demonstrate the generic existence of a new
scale separating regimes where the fluid is perfect and imperfect. We obtain
the equations for the evolution of dark-energy density perturbations in both
these regimes. The model also features two other known scales: the Compton
scale related to the breaking of shift symmetry and the Jeans scale which we
show is determined by the speed of propagation of small scalar-field
perturbations, i.e. causality, as opposed to the frequently used definition of
the ratio of the pressure and energy-density perturbations.
