Heartburn from homemade wine?

I started a simple sugar, water and yeast brew about 3 weeks ago, and it had stopped fermenting and cleared so clear it looked like water, so I bottled them and drank a 750 yesterday. I got a really bad burning sort of sensation in my chest. I don't know if it's necessarily heartburn, but it was extremely uncomfortable and lasted for 30 minutes to an hour.

After that happened, I wasn't sure whether or not to dump the rest out, but I decided to give it one more try today and see if maybe it was something I ate. It happened again. It's a very uncomfortable burning/heat sensation in my sternum, right by my heart. I tried taking some Tums which usually work immediately when I get heartburn, but it didn't do anything to fix it. While it's happening, I don't want to do anything except die. Needless to say, i'm dumping the rest out, but does anyone have any idea what could be causing this?

I have 3 more things brewing right now, but started them all after I bought a pretty expensive kit, and they're all brewing in much better equipment that was properly sterilized.

If my JAOM ends up doing the same thing to me, after all the precautions I took, I might give up on this whole hobby

Are you serious? This sounds worst than prison hooch..

Of course you will feel bad drinking this.. What did you expect?


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Yeah. If you are brewing up sugar water and yeast you are going to have some kind of horrible hooch. JAOM is a good place to start. If you followed the instructions, you should be fine. Get yourself a couple of beer or wine ingredient kits and start with those.

Jug I understand the feeling. On rare occasion I have made a brew that caused some strange symptoms. I once had one that was less like burning but created a tightness in the chest and I guess you might consider it like burning. I did the same as you and took tums followed by milk and nothing.

I actually chalked it up to an allergy. I am finding I have acute allergies for many things. In that ones case I have yet to identify if it was sulphites, sorbate, yeast biproducts or any of the ingredients by themselfs that do this to me so not sure.

Since you had a very simple recipe that was devoid of nutrients you may have had higher levels of fusel oils, Diacetyl or other odd chemicals yeast like to make when stressed. You may be allergic to one of those and with proper well nutrient feed yeast you may not get this again.