Is it possible to die from drinking beer?

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Vorsicht709

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Okay before I continue I know alcohol is bad for you this is only to settle an argument I am having with a friend (who thinks alcohol is the devil).

Is it possible to drink your self to death on beer?? We are arguing over whether you can actually drink enough beer AT ONE TIME to get lethal ALCOHOL POSIONING. I know about the negative aspects of alcohol and prolonged excessive consumption and that there is numerous things that are alcohol related that can cause death. But the arugement seems to be that it is physically impossible to fit enough beer into your stomach to cause lethal alcohol poisoning.

Before i get inevitably flamed i have tried googling it but i could not find a website that looked only at beer consumption in one sitting.
 
Several people have died from drinking too much water in a short period of time, so I'm sure beer could do it too.
 
Lets just say the average 5%. And again I know you can die from drinking to much water at one time but I am only concerned with alcohol poisoning. If the water in the beer is what would kill you, that must mean water is the devil!!!
 
i'd say it's very unlikely but possible.

your body will naturally vomit when it gets poisoned, but you could easily die from asphyxia if you passed out and choked on your own vomit.

i don't think your stomach could hold enough beer, though, to actually get your B/A level high enough to shut down your bodily functions. you'd get full, your body would have to process it, and you'd have to drink more and you just couldn't do that fast enough.

i don't believe there has ever been a documented case of someone dying without harder alcohol involved.
 
This page shows some good figures for determining your answer. This calculator is also helpful.

After 10 drinks (the standard glass of wine, 12 oz beer, or shot of liquor), a 180 lb person would have a BAC of .25 (assuming zero time between drinks, I think). So, after 20 "instantaneous" drinks, the BAC would be roughly double that - .50, which is enough to kill. Subtract only .01% for every 40 minutes of drinking. So, 20 drinks in an hour would be about .48-.49, still greater than the .40 that Wikipedia says is required to be lethal.

Twenty 12 oz beers is nearly two gallons. A quick Google search shows that the average human stomach can hold about 4 liters, or just over a gallon.

So, in order to get alcohol poisoning from beer alone, you'd have to drink a beer every 3 minutes for an hour and urinate nearly a gallon by the half hour mark. Is it possible? Maybe. Is it likely? Not really.
 
Yuri_Rage said:
...

So, in order to get alcohol poisoning from beer alone, you'd have to drink a beer every 3 minutes for an hour and urinate nearly a gallon by the half hour mark. Is it possible? Maybe. Is it likely? Not really.
Click to expand...
Yeah, but what a great way to go...:D
 
I figured as much. I highly doubt anyone would even get that much beer into them without vomitting. Thanks for the help in figuring this out. This argument originated from my anti alcohol amigo thought i was going to die when i was getting a dozen beer to go drinking for a night
Ma2brew I agree drinking beer with your friends would be an excellent way to go.
 
beer can range from extremely low alcohol to as much as 25% by volume not to be confused with alcohol by weight which isnt really used in the states. Im no expert but I've read the toxicity of chemicals are listed as LD50 (the amount needed to cause death in 50% of test subjects) and is measured in milligrams of the drug per kilogram of body weight. a standard drink i believe is defined as 12 fluid Oz at 5% (beer) 5 fluid Oz at 12% (wine) or 1.5 fluid Oz at 40% (shot of vodka) Alc by volume. I've read it takes about 9-10 drinks in under an hour to reach the LD50 level for a 100Lbs person. but there are cases where people have died with much less alcohol in there system. and there are of course other drinking related causes of death car crashes etc...
drinking and brewing is a lot of fun but ethanol is a toxin so drink responsibly
 
Yuri_Rage said:
So, in order to get alcohol poisoning from beer alone, you'd have to drink a beer every 3 minutes for an hour and urinate nearly a gallon by the half hour mark. Is it possible? Maybe. Is it likely? Not really.
Click to expand...


Hmm... but you would just have to get the beer out of your stomach, right? The beer goes into the stomach, then the intestines, then the bladder, and they gets urinated out.

So, wouldn't the relevant question be more how fast it moves out of the stomach, into the intestines, etc.?
 
9/9 you just added a whole new dimension to this conversation. On a gross note according to Yahoo anwsers you can die from pouring (and absorbing) two 12oz beers into your anus. Though Ive never heard of anyone drinking beer this way
 
Take something like DFH World Wide Stout.. yeah, I think you can poison yourself on three bombers in a half hour. Ok, maybe not but you're going to lose the arguement anyway because your friend already invoked the religion card.
 
9/9's comment is the reason I put "Maybe" after "Is it possible?" I have no idea if you can process that much liquid that fast, and I didn't have much luck finding the answer to that one. I'm guessing that it just might be possible, but it doesn't seem probable; especially when you consider the fact that you'd have to drink to the point of extreme stomach distension!
 
Vorsicht709 said:
9/9 you just added a whole new dimension to this conversation. On a gross note according to Yahoo anwsers you can die from pouring (and absorbing) two 12oz beers into your anus. Though Ive never heard of anyone drinking beer this way
Click to expand...


Mmmmmm..... bum beer. I guess the long neck bottles would be best and cans would be worst, if not impossible. If you've got a back door that can accomodate one of those bad boys, your control probably isn't what it could be. Best case scenario would be find brown mist belches.
 
I wonder if I can find a website which shows how to pour the perfect pint of guinness..... Into my ass. Deathbrewer that is th foulest thing i have heard about somebody actually doing with beer.
 
Vorsicht709 said:
Is it possible to drink your self to death on beer??
Click to expand...

Nope! I tried it many times while attending College, and it just isn't possible.

Many years ago A friend and I drank 2 cases of beer in 4 hours. We didn't die.... As a matter of fact, after 12 hours of sleep, I woke up without a hangover... but then maybe I was still druck:cross:
 
Not incluiding Drinking while driving..

A) Most deaths from drinking beer relate to vomiting while passed out.

B) Doing something really stupid like telling a biker's GF she has a nice ass just as 20 members of a biker gang walk by.
 
I work in an inner city Emergeny Room in a not so nice part of the city. We see more than our fair share of drunks. (And heroin OD's and crackheads and pysch pt's, etc, etc, etc.) We also see a lot of really nice people, too. It's not all *****ies.

How a given level of ethanol will affect you depends on how regularly you expose yourself to ethanol. You get better at processing it the more you see it. And teh effects on your body vary with how often you drink.

Legally drunk in MA is 0.08%. That is less than one tenth of one percent of the circulating blood in a person. As far as the lab repots go that equates to 80 mg per deciliter. Some folks are barely able to stay awake at 80. A teenager going out drinking a few beers for the first time might be totally hammered and tossing his cookies after reaching 80.

Conversely, you can be so tolerant of alcohol that your body starts to need it. You can seize if you abruptly stop drinking. With some of our regulars we worry about them starting to seize from alcohol withdrawal if their level gets down too close to zero without medication to prevent it. Most people are pretty well ****faced with a level around 300 (or around 4 times the legal limit.) That is were most amateurs' get 'falling down' drunk. The real pro's can be stone cold sober at 300, so that you could hardly tell they'd been drinking. Oddly enough, body size has nothing at all to do with it. The drunkest I've ever seen anyone, who lived to walk away, was a little 21 year old Irish lass who couldn't have weighed 110 #'s if her pockets were full of rocks. She was sitting upright in bed carrying on a sort of reasonable conversation with us. Her level was north of 625 mg/dl. Although obviously impaired, she was no stranger to being totally pissed. (This little quirk in human metabolism leads to one of the more entertaining ways to pass the time while at work. Every once in a while we play "Guess the BAL!" Everyone puts a dollar in and gets to guess what the blood alcohol level will be. Closest to the pin wins.)


Give half that 625 mg/dl amount to that same teenaged kid on his first night out and he dies. He gets so sedated that he looses his gag reflex and when he inevitably yaks up all that beer he'll drowns in his own vomit. (Think Janis Joplin.) Or he gets so sedated he just forgets to take his next breath. Not a good way to check out. Worse if you don't check out but just take an oxygen vacation and end up a vegetable on life support for the next 45 years.

We figure that the average person's liver is able to processaround 25 points per hour of alcohol. So if you are at 80, or 0.08 it's going to take 3 + hours for you to be 'sober.' And one more thing to think about. If you go out, driving or taking a cab or walking, and have a few too many and trip and fall and end up in an ER, don't plan on leaving anytime soon. We'll keep you till you are sober. And sober by our definition of sober, not yours. I'm not going to be living under a bridge because your family is living in my house after I let you leave ****faced and you walk out the door and get run over by a bus. If you try to leave we'll stop you, using whatever means necissary, up to and including having security tying you down to the bed and medicating you and sending you to sleepytime land for the rest of the night.

OK, I just re-read this and I sort of got off on a tanget, but I figure there is some good information here so I'll leave it. Yes Virginia, you can drink yourself to death. It's easier for amatures but pro's do it to. Pro's generally do it by passing out in February and freezeing to death, but name a way to drink yourself to death and someone has tried it. (Hey, hold my beer for a minute and watch me... Without camcorders and alcohol ther would be no America's Funniest Videos.)
 
Well put, I was almost choking on some of the comments being said previously but I think you covered it from the most (related) educated viewpoint...

paulthenurse said:
The drunkest I've ever seen anyone, who lived to walk away, was a little 21 year old Irish lass who couldn't have weighed 110 #'s if her pockets were full of rocks.
Click to expand...
Oh and if she claimed 21 that means she was aged 18-21 even if you are truely pissed, you'll always correct for that one (you just can't always lie convicingly!!!) She makes me proud to be Irish!
 
paulthenurse said:
one more thing to think about. If you go out, driving or taking a cab or walking, and have a few too many and trip and fall and end up in an ER, don't plan on leaving anytime soon. We'll keep you till you are sober. And sober by our definition of sober, not yours. {...} If you try to leave we'll stop you, using whatever means necissary, up to and including having security tying you down to the bed and medicating you and sending you to sleepytime land for the rest of the night.
Click to expand...

So if I come to the ER pissed and try to leave, you will tie me to a bed an medicate me? So if I wake up and try to leave again before the meds wear off, will you tie me up and medicate me again?

This could work out great!
 
Vorsicht709 said:
Okay before I continue I know alcohol is bad for you this is only to settle an argument I am having with a friend (who thinks alcohol is the devil).
Click to expand...

You need to pick your friends more carefully.
 
Yuri_Rage said:
This page shows some good figures for determining your answer. This calculator is also helpful.

After 10 drinks (the standard glass of wine, 12 oz beer, or shot of liquor), a 180 lb person would have a BAC of .25 (assuming zero time between drinks, I think). So, after 20 "instantaneous" drinks, the BAC would be roughly double that - .50, which is enough to kill. Subtract only .01% for every 40 minutes of drinking. So, 20 drinks in an hour would be about .48-.49, still greater than the .40 that Wikipedia says is required to be lethal.

Twenty 12 oz beers is nearly two gallons. A quick Google search shows that the average human stomach can hold about 4 liters, or just over a gallon.

So, in order to get alcohol poisoning from beer alone, you'd have to drink a beer every 3 minutes for an hour and urinate nearly a gallon by the half hour mark. Is it possible? Maybe. Is it likely? Not really.
Click to expand...


However, you forget a possibility: that a determiend alcoholic or frat boy might drink 4 liters, absorb significant alcohol, puke and then begin drinking again. Then this person could rapidly abosrb alcohol while defeating the 4 liter stomach capacity.

Furthermore, flat beer would be more easily consumed and allow for greater absorbtion. Additionally, one could use some method of consuming the alcohol to speed the process. In fact, the common college party method of a 'beer bong' achieves both ends-- rapidly outgasses the beers poured into it and allows the user to drop the booze directly to the stomach in a single rapid movement.

I submit that a determined and foolhardy person could in fact give themselves alcohol poisioning and in rather short order using a beer bong.
 
Yuri_Rage said:
[youtube]Arj1yTjL4rc[/youtube]
Click to expand...


THis is the wrong clip. You were thinking of the part of strangebrew when bob drinks all the beer in the tank, he didint die.
 
I once had an estimated .23 to .27 and probably would have died without medical attention. And this was with a 4 beer-a-day habit so I was already quite alcohol tolerant. Of course, that was knocking several whiskey shots in a row on top of 8 beers....
 
Yes, I've seen it happen once and almost happen a second time. The second one was my sophomore roommate & he was trying to drink 20 buds to celebrate his 20th birthday. Spent two days in the hospital, one of them on a ventilator.
 
Vorsicht709 said:
9/9 you just added a whole new dimension to this conversation. On a gross note according to Yahoo anwsers you can die from pouring (and absorbing) two 12oz beers into your anus. Though Ive never heard of anyone drinking beer this way
Click to expand...
Well for those of you who want to make your homebrew last longer.....this could be an option, I will either brew more or buy more.
I heard that was how the C.I.A. made Marilyn Monroe's death look like a suicide.But seems like you would see more passed out winos with wine bottles in the wrong place.:D :confused: :D
 

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