Dangers of Homebrewing

One can only hope.


Oh some more things...From http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=716465BC-E7F2-99DF-3EAB0C599937C0E6

NPR Science Fridays.

http://www.npr.org/2010/12/03/131785456/Searching-For-Science-In-A-Glass-of-Beer

He also talks about it here Bamfoth's book on Google books.


Gee, Torg, where E-coli, and other pathogens are concerned...and pathogens in beer, I think I'd go with Professor Bamforth, than anything you cite, or opine on...But that's just me.

 

Revvy, I will search EBSCO tonight when I get home and I can see if I can find aticles about pathogen survival in beer. Maybe I can find the whole paper of that abstract you posted.

 

So Revvy, if I'm reading you right, Jesus was actually doing everybody a favor by turning that water into wine.

 

"Nothing pathogenic can survive in beer." ~ Ben Franklin

Yes, I did.

 

Yeah, I'm not at work at the medical school where my office computer automatically unlocks all publications that can be opened from academic computers. (Like if it recognizes your IP adress as academic)

But even just googling "Pathogens in beer, turns up NOTHING backing up the idea that anything pathogenic can exist. And believe me over the years I've gone deep into this researches to counter idiocy like this.

Maybe our friend needs this... http://tinyurl.com/4jgxaal

I keep saying I'm gonna quit responding to him, but to me, this is one of the most important things new brewers need to know, and therefore any mis-information needs to be countered. They are scared enough to even LOOK at their beer for fear fo having it spotanaeously turn to poison and kill their friends. It's because they only know enough to be dangerous we all were there. People still think you can go blind from drinking homebrew. So we don't NEED any more misinfomation out here for people to stumble upon when they are looking for knowlege and re-assurance that what they are doing is going to be okay.

I'll say it again. The whole delicate history of our re-legalization of homebrewing in 1978 (40 years after it was "conveniently" left off the re-peal of prhohibition) is predicated up knowlege, especially about the SAFETY of this hobby.

If you follow basic sanitiary precautions (hell one could argue even if you don't, since they didn't know basic safety precautions 8,000 years ago ) the only harm that can come to you and your friends from making beer, is to your LIVER and a few braincells....

But that's from consumption.

You can't make you or your firends sick, can't give them food poisoning, can't give theme-coli (unless from the above mentioned methods) or a yeast infection or anything that can harm you or them. It is NOT possible, for anything that can harm you, to grow in your beer.

 

HEDOUBLETOOTHPIC YEAH!!!!!!

But we all know it was REALLY beer. They just got the word mis translated from the Aramaic language.

 

What can I say? I get curious about things sometimes.

 

This is my theory! But when new people do ask if its safe to drink I go "Well, I haven't gone blind yet!"

 

You could also go two other ways...

"I'm almost blind, but not from homebrew"
or
"My eyesight has improved since I started drinking homebrew... Just wish the GF/wife/other would also improve."

 

I was always told that too much mastication made you go blind...

 

Lots to read as a result of my EBSCO search, primarily dealing with fungi that infect barley such as Fusarium complex and Ochratoxin A.

When it comes to Ochratoxin A (symbols that don't show are ^-1):

For Fusarium mychotoxins (important note: this is during the brewing process, not the beer itself DON levels were tested in 14 US beers and none were found to contain the toxin. In the paper itself they cover this and say that while toxins were found to be transferred more research is needed.):

One paper that was pretty interesting looked for a correlation between home-brewed beer consumption and esophageal cancer in Africa due to a higher iron content in home-brewed beers vs. commercial. They found that while home-brewed beer did have a significantly higher iron content (258-fold actually) there was no correlation. The patients who drank home-brewed beer did not suffer from iron-overload.


If anyone is interested in these papers let me know and I will email them to you. I have the PDFs saved.

 

This basically says maybe at best. and that the study showed a decrease in the last year which means that beer is probably not the cause for the exposure...but just in case "measures should be taken"...

Is based on grain steeping and appears to be preboil analysis or did I get something crossed in the lawyer text?

So I stand with my initial response. No biological pathogen can survive the brewing and fermentation process, that is widely accepted as normal, that can be harmful or fatal to humans.

 

It's also only in Belgium, needs to be done in a cross-cultural study to be found to be relevant.

Check my note, the abstract for that one wasn't very good. They did find that toxins could be transferred to the final product but toxins had to be present across the entire process for that to be true. The important thing for that one is Fusarium is visible to the naked eye when it infects barley.



IF YOUR BARLEY LOOKS LIKE THIS, DON'T BREW WITH IT.

 

Oh god not Fusarium again. That's another one that folks in fear stumble upon and like to throw up in our faces. Again it's so RARE in occurance, that we the homebrewers don't need to stress out about. I posted stuff about it on here before.

It's from a thread that ended up like this surely will be locked by the mods.

Yeah we've been down the Fusarium road on here befpre. My chances of winning the lottery, finding out I'm the last surviving member of Spanish royality, and bedding twin redhead irish lasses in matching fishnets in the same day, are higher than anyone on here getting sick from Fusarium laced grain.

 

This is something I forgot about.

I did the same search at work and came up with the same thing.

 

Did you enumerate these in order of probability or desire?

This thread has provided serious fodder for some memorable quotations.

 

Ok, so if a werewolf bites a vampire, runs by my brew kettle and spits in it, I could come down with a bad case of the Fusariums...seriously...

Humans would get gravely ill if they went into heavily used, poorly cleaned, public restrooms and licked toilet seats. The danger is very real. Since no one actually does this, we will not see warning signs that advise against this activity...same with the straws that are being grasped at here.

The problem is you have to be using nasty grain. I can only speak from personal experience but when fungus grows on/in stuff it stinks...bad. Removing it from the thought of being used.

AKA

I have never seen a "My grain is moldy, should I use it?" thread. I am guessing that I never will...common sense, we promote it!

The other way is for a wild spore to float through the air and get in contact with the wort. Since my wort is hot ( I never drop the temp to below ambient prior to transferring to a fermenter) there is a thermal "up draft" that keeps crap like this out of my wort. Making it impossible for a spore to "fall into" my wort.

So my final thought is this...

General good practices, cleanliness and safe food handling procedures reduce your chances of getting a biological pathogen in your beer to zero.

 

See I still am going to say that normal fermentation, hops, and the boil alone reduces your chances of getting a biological pathogen to zero.

II think if there was stuff that could live in beer and kill you, the human race would have died out a hell of a long time ago!

I think adding the layers of "common sense" that you mention increases the odds of getting a biological pathogen from our beer to alongsides the odds of the "perfect day" with the red heads mentioned earlier.

 

"Fusarium is proof that God hates us and wants us to be unhappy." ~ Ben Franklin

 

I spoke with an old roommate who works with crop diseases (degree from University of Florida in Agricultural Management, currently works as a contractor for the state of Florida checking farms for disease) about this, he said that in the US Fusarium is basically a non-issue for food use barley and wheat. Infected heads won't typically get past processing.

 

Wow, we seem to really be veering into obscurity here with rare toxins. I hope we can all agree that home brew is at least as safe as anything else you would cook at home and that it's much safer than most. Do your friends also refuse to eat at your house? If so, I suggest finding new friends.

I think most people have aversions to homebrew because they equate it with distilling, which has a reputation for making people go blind, but is also perfectly safe (not that I've tried it or condone it and all the other legal disclaimers required). The distillation process just separates the components of the original mash, as opposed to creating new ones. Yes, it's possible to target and concentrate the tiny portion of methanol present in a normal fermentation, but it would only be a few drops worth and, from what I understand, the normal process is to discard the first few ounces from the still because it contains a high percentage of fusels and other crap - including the methanol - that's not desireable in the finished product.

The notion that homemade spirits contain methanol comes from prohibition where unscrupulous bootleggers would attempt to redistill or just plain cut their swill with industrial products containing methanol and other "denaturing" toxins as required by the Feds. There was a good article a while back about how the government knew that most deaths from alcohol poisoning were caused by its own policies but chose not to do anything about it:

http://www.slate.com/id/2245188/

 

Now That's funny!!

 

Wait, so how do you open your bottles then?
Sorry if this has been asked before, I'm new here.

 

Well I once heard about this stripper in tijuana who could open them with her....

Welcome, you'll fit in well here...get over to the tap room with your bad self.

 

And buy some Tap Room pint glasses before they are gone!

 

I know it's an old thread, but I wanted to chime in with a few links on the subject of pregnancy, because the original poster who said any alcohol is dangerous to the fetus still hasn't posted any sources, so I went and found some of my own

Light Drinking Said Ok for Pregnant Women
"It is no longer valid to argue that we don't know enough about low-dose drinking during pregnancy or that the known effects of binge drinking may penetrate to low-dose drinkers somehow," he added. "There is no detectable risk associated with light or moderate drinking during pregnancy."

The researchers tapped into a long-term study that has followed more than 18,500 children since birth between 2000 and 2002.

Final results of the study, published today in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, agreed with previous work that children born to heavy binge drinkers do worst on developmental tests, because excessive exposure to alcohol in the womb kills nerve cells and causes brain damage.

The kids of teetotalers did almost as poorly, however, reflecting the complicated phenomenon that people who never drink have poor outcomes on many measures of health.

But the study found no evidence that light drinking during pregnancy causes emotional or learning problems in children through the age of five. In some tests of vocabulary and pattern creation, boys actually did best if their moms drank a little while carrying them. The findings confirmed what the researchers had found when the kids were three years old.

Alcohol and Pregnancy
There are no studies showing harmful effects from 1–3 drinks a week.

A study by Willford, Leech, and Day found that prenatal alcohol exposure equivalent to 3-6 drinks a week correlated with lower IQ scores in African-American children but not in whites. As one commentator points out, the same study showed that maternal consumption of cocaine correlated with increased overall IQ scores in white children: this “suggests that perhaps the standards for confounding factors and statistical significance might have been too low.”

If we go by this study, beer is bad but cocaine is good?

 

And I thought pregnancy was expensive before....

 

yet another reason New Zealand is on my list of places to move to. :rockin:

New Zealand is the highest ranked english speaking nation on the index of freedom.

 

Piffle. New Zealand doesn't have the same history as the U.S., so its laws (including those related to alcohol) are different. Four decades ago, I researched the prospects of emigration to Australia, on just this basis- more freedom. Well, I discovered that in some ways that was true, but in other ways not. And things have certainly not moved in the direction of more freedom in Oz since then. And socially, the best way to describe Australia when I looked into it was the U.S. about 30 years in the past. How about NO.



Freedom is relative, or, in the case of the United States, it's better described as a balance between freedom and equality. Many people think those are the same thing, but they are in opposition to each other and have always been. They virtually define our history, and the increasing rate of change in favor of equality at the expense of freedom subsumes most of the issues of our time.

 

actually i should correct myself, Australia is now #3 and New Zealand is down to #4 for 2012, but neither are heading in the right direction but still much better than #10

 

Home made distilled beverages are not illegal; you just need a permit.

 

The biggest danger drinking homebrew is a beer belly. The biggest danger to a homebrewer is beer drinking friends.

 

Was just thinking that if it was a good batch, your "friend" might get the last one...

 

If the OP doesn't respond it's probably because he didn't get the permit and is still in jail...since 2009!

 

Or the homebrew killed him