The Homebrew Beer Farts

Has anyone come up with a good reason for this? I've got a good hypothesis on it. Yeast enjoy acidic environments and temperatures around 100 degrees (this is the temp wyeast uses to grow yeast although this is a terrible temp to pitch or ferment at) I'm thinking that the stomach and colon make the perfect environment for yeast to thrive for a short time, during this time they make tons of gas by eating broken down sugars from our foods until dying in the colon. This gas causes terrible but distinct beer farts.

I've never really noticed this problem, but my beer probably doesn't have a lot of yeast in it by the time I drink it.

Even from craft beers? I get it from these too, but I have noticed that you can build a tolerance, but I've cut my drinking lately so I notice it more now lol I used to never notice

I seem to usually have a lot of gas but not usually of the stinky variety.

I have read that most farts are due to air ingested while eating or drinking. that said, beer has usually more than one volume of CO2, which is why it foams...all that has to get out somehow. so if you are drinking highly carbonated beer, expect more farts. A friend of mine had a real problem with this until he switched to not carbing his beers, but switched to nitrogen to push the beer out of the keg. You still get foam and there is after all some CO2 still in solution from fermentation, but he has not suffered from beer farts ever since. your mileage may vary...:cross:

I believe I burp out most of the CO2 I injest. That said, PBR in larger quantities gives me more than just beer farts the next morning...I hope YMMV.

It's not as much the yeast as the oligosaccharides (long chain sugars) left in your beer.

Your digestive track gives those sugars an extra spin.

It's why homebrew farts are more prevalent from large, complex beers, and why filtered commercial beers don't really do much.

And unfiltered simple, clean beers (commercial or homebrews) have plenty of yeast and rarely ellicit that reaction.

One final item that nobody ever remembers to tell new brewers until it's too late is: "Don't drink the yeast layer on the bottom of the bottle." People will say, "My first homebrew was pretty good, but that last swallow was terrible!" or "His homebrew really gave me gas" or "It must have been spoiled, I had to go to the bathroom right away after I drank it." Welcome to the laxative effects of live yeast!

http://www.howtobrew.com/section1/chapter11-9.html

It's beer's way of telling you that you need a healthier diet. heh

Once your system becomes accustomed to homebrew they will taper off and you will not get them as badly. I find I get them worse from cheaper commercial brews now. Now, if we could only come up with a way to trap the Toxic Green Gasses and turn them into fuel for our burners I would be set.

This may be juvenile, but I love the homebrew farts. The SWMBO lives in mortal fear of me drinking my beer...every night becomes a potential dutch-oven threat

My Wife farts right along with me. It's not really so bad any more once I switched over to nearly all homebrew drinking.

masskrug said:

One final item that nobody ever remembers to tell new brewers until it's too late is: "Don't drink the yeast layer on the bottom of the bottle." People will say, "My first homebrew was pretty good, but that last swallow was terrible!" or "His homebrew really gave me gas" or "It must have been spoiled, I had to go to the bathroom right away after I drank it." Welcome to the laxative effects of live yeast!

http://www.howtobrew.com/section1/chapter11-9.html

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Many friends of Hefeweizen in Bavaria swirl the last sip of beer in the bottle before pouring it to get all of the yeast in their glass.

Yes we've discussed it before. Like Az said it's It's pretty a common reaction to the larger amount of yeast in homebrew, and bottle conditioned beers in genera. .It has to do with oligosaccharides, it's the same stuff that is in bean that causes us to toot. If you google oligosaccharides you find out that;

Brewers dried yeast as a source of mannan oligosaccharides for weanling pigs...

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THe article is here.

Alton Brown on the Good eats episode on Creole Rice and beans did a great spiel on oligosaccharides. But like I have mentioned repeatedly that our gut bacteria eventually gets used to the yeast and can digest it easier without the toots over time.

Well Alton said, "The only way to control your emissions is to train your system by eating more beans."



It's at the 10 minute mark.

We drink a lot more beer and a lot closer apart than most of us eat chilli, or beans. I mean I sure as heck don't eat chilli or kidney beans every day, or every week, or even every month, but I have drank beer, and especially living, bottle conditioned beers nearly every day since I started brewing. So that's why after the first year or so, my yeast farts greatly reduced.

I personally do eat hot chillies every day, have done for years, but still produce enormous toots ;-)

I don't know about the rest of the world but over here from September time is Burcak (young wine) season with it being sold everywhere. That stuff is cloudy as hell and produces the same reaction as when you drink lots of homebrew the first few times, copious farting and a visit to the loo next morning

And actually my new food god Harold McGee, author of the bible of food science;



Explains it quite well.

"The bean family tends to feed its seedling with carbohydrates that unlike starch or sugar, our bodies are not capable of digesting. We can handle starch and sugar molecules just fine but we cannot deal with these oligosaccharides. So what happens when you can't digest something, well, it just stays in your digestive system instead of being absorbed. It turns out that the bacteria that live in our large intestines are perfectly capable of digesting these oligosaccharides and when they do so, they generate a variety of gases: hydrogen, methane and that's why we end up with gas when we eat beans."

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BadMrFrosty said:

I personally do eat hot chillies every day, have done for years, but still produce enormous toots ;-)

I don't know about the rest of the world but over here from September time is Burcak (young wine) season with it being sold everywhere. That stuff is cloudy as hell and produces the same reaction as when you drink lots of homebrew the first few times, copious farting and a visit to the loo next morning

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It has nothing to do with chillies, it has to do with BEANS...Do you eat copious amounts of beans every day?

This is cool it's a breakdown of the Oligosaccharides found in beer.

Oligosaccharides in Beer
High-performance liquid chromatography is widely used for the analysis of sugars. However, due to the numerous types of sugars, the optimal separation and detection method must be selected for each sample.
The figure shows the analysis of oligosaccharides in beer using separation by the partition method, which can be used to analyze sugars from monosaccharides to decamers, and detection with a differential refractive index detector.

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If you want to seriously geek out on the topic, this looks like an interesting article.

Homebrew and hot pockets don't mix well. I'm tearing up as I type this. Like rancid garlic.

Haha, I eat black beans and brown rice almost every day, (try to eat healthy to balance out the beer drinkin). I can tell the difference between my bean farts and my homebrew farts. They both stink, but the homebrew farts smell a little better.

It's a probiotic.

Enjoy it.

My coworker has been dying for the last few weeks...she works 3 feet from me. Poor gal....For her sake I hope these things die down after a while.

Hmm... I haven't had any problems with "emissions" since I started homebrewing. I don't eat beans on a regular basis either. Now milk products on the other hand...

Come now we should not resort to childish gutter humor saying word like fart and toot. We are off gassing our internal fermenter.....Often we are off gassing them but never at the dinner table NOOOO

hey, how'd your triple w/orange turn out?

Glad to know I'm not the only one. Homebrew destroys me.

I like enjoy to swirl the last inch of a bottle. It is a natural source of vitamin B12

I don't know why I like this lady so much, but I do. She's the queen of gas. Anyway, most everything you need to know about gas is here.

Watch this get your Bachelors of Farts degree. Honestly, it's entertaining and educational at the same time. You'll find out that that gas is just delayed fermentation. Woot!

http://www.beanogas.com/university-of-gas

passedpawn said:

I don't know why I like this lady so much, but I do. She's the queen of gas. Anyway, most everything you need to know about gas is here.

Watch this get your Bachelors of Farts degree. Honestly, it's entertaining and educational at the same time. You'll find out that that gas is just delayed fermentation. Woot!

http://www.beanogas.com/university-of-gas

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Oh.....Dear.....God....... :fro: