Sick as a dog today... My DIPA's fault?

[flanken]

So I left work this morning feeling really awful... Had it coming out both ends and I'll leave any further description to your imaginations...

No one else in my family felt bad today, we all ate dinner together and had the same home-cooked meal. The only real difference for me was I had one of my DIPAs with dinner.

Usually I have some yeast and other sediment in my bottles, which I know is totally normal, and this layer didn't look excessively dark or large or anything unusual. And usually when I pour I leave that later out of my glass, but didn't last night.

I'm no paranoid and I have a feeling the answer is no but... Is there any way I made myself sick?

I am super thorough on sanitation and cleanliness...

Just laying in bed feeling a little better and thought I'd post

Brian

 

[atom]

i highly doubt it was the beer...you just had one right?

 

[douglasbarbin]

There is nothing in beer that will make you sick.

 

[Aristotelian]

Make someone in your family drink a bottle. If they are OK then nothing to worry about.

 

[WrQth]

Oddly enough I think I had a similar experience but it was a commercial DIPA at 8.5% abv and I had 600ml. Purely anecdotal but when i drink a red wine that is high in sulfate I get a headache which makes me want to point the finger at the high sulfate which would be common in a DIPA.

 

[Gameface]

You were throwing up?

Sanitation of your brewing stuff is a non-issue here. No pathogens can live in beer. In fact, the bacteria we are fighting against normally are added intentionally for certain sours or for making malt vinegar.

Now if it was a little intestinal distress, if you're not used to ingesting a lot of yeast they can cause some gas and maybe even loose bowel movements. If that particular beer had a lot of unfermented complex sugars it might have been that you didn't digest those sugars and now there are some of your normal intestinal bacteria having a feast and causing some issues.

But if you've got a fever and are throwing up then I'd say it was something else.

 

[JonM]

Far more likely that you picked up a bug someplace else. Things like norivirus can do their thing pretty quickly, but if it's some other kind of enteric bug, it might have been from something you ate on, say, Tuesday or Wednesday.

Wash your hands, bleach the toilet, and have a yours and yours alone hand towel. No need to pas it on the rest of the family.

 

[flanken]

i highly doubt it was the beer...you just had one right?

Haha yeah just one...

You were throwing up?

Sanitation of your brewing stuff is a non-issue here. No pathogens can live in beer. In fact, the bacteria we are fighting against normally are added intentionally for certain sours or for making malt vinegar.

Now if it was a little intestinal distress, if you're not used to ingesting a lot of yeast they can cause some gas and maybe even loose bowel movements. If that particular beer had a lot of unfermented complex sugars it might have been that you didn't digest those sugars and now there are some of your normal intestinal bacteria having a feast and causing some issues.

But if you've got a fever and are throwing up then I'd say it was something else.

Yeah you know the saying... Correlation does not equal causation and I've finished most of this batch off without issue.

Maybe it's just a bug

 

[FloppyKnockers]

Maybe it's your body's way of telling you that you should have more than one. There's sober kids in China...drink up!

 

[lolcats]

If it tasted fine, then it's not the beer's fault

Maybe the beer + food mixed increased the acidity in your stomach and caused heartburn?

Alcohol can cause acid reflux especially if your meal had lots of fats


Or else it could be unrelated to beer/dinner and you could have ingested a bacteria/virus during the afternoon

 

[aprichman]

There are no known pathogens that can live in beer, although sadly the same cannot be said about spoilage organisms.

People have a different level of sensitivity to pathogens, for instance the elderly, infants, and people with compromised immune systems are particularly at danger to food borne illness. Furthermore, there are many other factors such as genetics and overall fitness that play into the infectious dose for pathogens.

That means that 4 people could eat the exact same number of pathogens and not all of them would get sick. In the real world there are many instances where 4 people eat pathogens and none of them get sick. For instance, Listeria monocytogenes can be consumed by most of the population with no ill effect but pregnant women and the elderly can suffer severe consequences from extremely small doses.

Then you also must consider the variation within the food itself. Your portion may have contained a higher load of bacteria than other portions. Perhaps your portion was thicker or in a poor area in the oven and was heated a few degrees cooler than the others. Even small variations in temperature or initial bacterial load have a HUGE effect on the safety of food.

Furthermore, some foodborne illness doesn't pop up until 48 hours after the consumption event. And if you didn't wash your hands before eating something you could have introduced the bacteria or virus to your system.

The one thing I can tell you with certainty is that a high alcohol beer is not going to have pathogens. Even a nasty infected beer is not capable of bearing pathogens. The blame lies elsewhere.

 

[flanken]

Thank the beer gods it wasn't my DIPA. I want to enter it into the Michigan Homebrew Competition and could picture the headlines now...