"People have died drinking homebrew..."

[govner1]

What a load of crap!


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[unionrdr]

I was just thinking that maybe they're confusing beer brewing with distilling moonshine. They both start as a fermented mash. But in distilling,the first & last runnings are methol alcohol,which is poisonous. Not enough of it in home brew to matter,but it seems they don't realize this.

 

[cluckk]

People have died drinking water too. Seems like faulty logic.

 

[unionrdr]

Definitely faulty logic. some confusion steming from said faulty logic at any rate.

 

[splattsmier]

Could he have been reading Food Babe?

Haha actually LOLed when I read this comment!

 

[youngpretender13]

Yeah i suppose if he is going to stop drinking homebrew for fear of death then there are a few other things he might wanna hold out on. Bacon is cholesterol hell.

 

[whoaru99]

Make bacon beer then so the cholesterol and the botulinum can battle it out...

 

[PRE66_6TART]

People have been drinking homebrewed beer for millennia precisely because it was known to be safe to drink, when other beverages weren't. Basically it was a way to make unsafe water safe to drink. I'm pretty sure that's the main reason why beer exists in the first place.

 

[Malty_Dog]

Haha actually LOLed when I read this comment!

Me too. Who could forget her?

 

[dlester]

Great thread. I laughed out loud at work and people looked: "What's he doing on the internet?"


Cheers,

 

[insanim8er]

This guy must have been doing it wrong. My homebrew gives me superpowers.

 

[NivekD]

In the words of the immortal Bugs Bunny "what a maroon"

You tell em Bugs...

 

[bajaedition]

foursh daysh into mysh researcsh and still alive

wishing I wash deeeadddd tis mornig when I wokerish upm burpppppp

but then dat dishhed not det er dt trim dedri, ahhhhh, beleechelch, ah

deter me fromsh my resolve to do moreish researsh to da, todayunp

Darn tapis dry, time to changer keg, WHO HOOO, a Bock, diser ish gonna be a good day to die

 

[dlester]

I read this thread and responded last week. Just this weekend I was extremely thirsty (California heat) and grabbed a Gatoraid out of my Son's baseball bag and chugged it. I felt hard objects on my tongue and looked at the bottle. It had tons of bacteria floating in the juice. Yes, I drank half the bottle, including chunks of bacteria, before realizing what had happened. I thought to myself, well, I'll have something to write about in this thread about people dying from infections in homebrew. I didn't get the slightest amount sick. By the way, I didn't expect to either. I always come back to this thread knowing there's going to be some comedy.


Cheers,

 

[kombat]

Just this weekend I was extremely thirsty (California heat) and grabbed a Gatoraid out of my Son's baseball bag and chugged it. I felt hard objects on my tongue and looked at the bottle. It had tons of bacteria floating in the juice. Yes, I drank half the bottle, including chunks of bacteria, before realizing what had happened.

Am I the only one who read this story, and the first thing I thought was, "I wonder if you could ferment Gatorade?"

Dang, I need to take a break from brewing. This might belong in the "You know you're a homebrewer when..." thread.

 

[Espresso]

Am I the only one who read this story, and the first thing I thought was, "I wonder if you could ferment Gatorade?"

Dang, I need to take a break from brewing. This might belong in the "You know you're a homebrewer when..." thread.

No, you're not the only one. I wonder what Gatorade is sweetened with? It probably has preservatives so it may be difficult to ferment, maybe with a good yeast cake from fermenting wine you could make it happen if it has fermentable sugars, plus added yeast nutrient.

 

[TopherM]

Repeat after me (again)... NOTHING. PATHOLOGIC. CAN. GROW. IN. BEER.

Here's some fun facts I was actually able to look up:

At about 2.6% alcohol, no know human pathogens (think H1N1, HIV/AIDS, black plague, polio, smallpox, cholera, ebola, e-coli, malaria, bubanic plague, the flu, etc.) survive EXCEPT one......ringworm. Ringworm has a tolerance to alcohol well up into double digits, and most ringworm medications contain up to 15% alcohol to kill it off! One of the listed ringworm medication side effects is "shakes from alcohol withdrawal." LOL!

All of the other "bacteria" that do flourish in beer and "infect" your beer are generally the same ones that occur naturally in the outer skins of fruits and vegetables (lactobacillus, most notably), and are marketed as "probiotics" down at GNC. Some of them are just variant strains of yeast (Brettanomyces). They are also the same ones used to make yogurt, cheese, sauerkraut, etc.. They taste delicious in proper proportions inn many foods, and are good for immune health and digestion!

Wild yeast and bacteria even saved humanity by offering a way to clean virus ridden water throughout history. Read the history of the Saison style, if you were unware.

So the bacteria in homebrew is FAR from something that will kill you. It's necessary to LIVE!

 

[rmart28]

If you taste your beer and it tastes infected, spill it. (Common sense)


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[TopherM]

I wonder what Gatorade is sweetened with?

I know!! Sugar.....sucrose/dextrose.....100% fermentable. However, if you do ferment it, you certainly aren't going to be left with much more than grain alcohol and water. Don't waste your time...

 

[TopherM]

If you taste your beer and it tastes infected, spill it. (Common sense)

NOT common sense. When I taste my beer and it tastes infected, I age it and make a delicious sour! Again, the bacteria and yeast strains that infect a beer are quite tasty in the correct proportions and are all probiotics that are quite good for you.

Don't automatically dump it, learn to make sours!

 

[Edbert]

Don't automatically dump it, learn to make sours!

Explain.

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[TopherM]

Well, all the bugs that will infect your beer are the same bugs that create sour styles. I'm not going to tell you that every infected beer you age is going to be a great beer, because obviously great tasting sours have to be balanced, but I can tell you that about 25% of the time when I let an infected beer just take it's course to transform to a sour (6-8 month conditioning period, minimum to my tastes), they end up as good beers. I guess it all depends on if you have enough space and fermenters to just set that one off to the side for a while.

For example, I make a clementine saison using fruit off a tree in my backyard everytime they ripen in late November. This year, I decided to add some limes to the mix. The lime seemed to ruin the recipe, but I decided to let it condition a bit to see if it improved. Well, the beer developed a lactobacillus infection (lacto is very common in fruit rinds, but takes a bit of time to take hold), so that's out the window, but I'm just going to let it age until summer and it has a decent shot of becoming a nice sour.

Only time will tell!

 

[Warthaug]

Here's some fun facts I was actually able to look up:

At about 2.6% alcohol, no know human pathogens (think H1N1, HIV/AIDS, black plague, polio, smallpox, cholera, ebola, e-coli, malaria, bubanic plague, the flu, etc.) survive EXCEPT one......ringworm.

This is simply not true. A number of pathogens easily survive into the 10+% alcohol range, including a fairly broad swath of the microbacteria genus (which includes leprosy and TB). One - Mycobacterium nonchromogenicum - survives in over 75% ethanol, and is a common infection in people silly enough to get acupuncture. In a fairly terrifying turn of events, alcohol tolerant strains of some pretty nasty bacteria (e.g. MRSA) have recently evolved, thanks to the blatant mis-use of alcohol-based hand sanitizers.

Few, if any, of the above examples would survive in beer, as the sanitizing effect of beer is a mixture of acidity, alcohol and hop compounds; most microorganisms will do OK in one or the other, but the combination of the three is lethal to most.

That said, there are a number of pathogens known to survive in beer, so the claim that 'no pathogen can survive in beer' is completely false. The good news is that the list of pathogens which can survivie in beer are all opportunistic pathogens which generally cause infections only in those with immune deficiencies. A few examples:

1. Rhodotorula (pathogenic yeast), found in many wild-fermented wines & beers
2. Several candidia's (pathogenic yeasts), again found in many wild-fermented wines & beers
3. E. coli O157:H7 and Salmonella Typhimurium (both food poisoning bacteria) can survive (not grow, but do survive) in beers upto ~6%, for well over a month.
4. Cryptococcus (pathogenic fungus). I've not seen this one in the medical literature, but I pulled some out of one of my wild yeast hunts, which use hopped wort for capture.

So while the claim is false, it is false only by a hairs breadth. Moreover, (E. coli/salmonella aside) the "danger" can be easily bypassed by susceptible individuals by drinking beers prepared using commercial saccharomyces yeast.

As for the e. coli/salmonella, they're passed via the fecal-oral route. Meaning if you're getting them in your beer you need to a) start washing your damned hands after you take a crap, and b) you need to stop stirring your post-boil wort with your hands. Because, aside from using your primary as a backup longdrop, I cannot think of any other way you'd get enough of them in there to cause a problem.

Bryan

 

[GuldTuborg]

Yes, a few can survive, in a dormant state (and I think this is the usual footnote to the simpler claim made above), but I've yet to hear of any that can reproduce. Are any able to reproduce well enough to significantly increase population? Or rather, increase enough to risk harm to those with normal immune systems?

 

[alane1]

I thought homebrew caused biliousness and a host of other ailments.

 

[knyland]

I know!! Sugar.....sucrose/dextrose.....100% fermentable. However, if you do ferment it, you certainly aren't going to be left with much more than grain alcohol and water. Don't waste your time...

I learned the hard way it will ferment. 3l camelback full of gator aid sitting in the back of the jeep for a week before I went to clean it out. It had fermented enough to burst the bag and leak gator aid all over the tub of my jeep. BTW it will grow mold in about that time to.

 

[Warthaug]

Yes, a few can survive, in a dormant state (and I think this is the usual footnote to the simpler claim made above), but I've yet to hear of any that can reproduce. Are any able to reproduce well enough to significantly increase population? Or rather, increase enough to risk harm to those with normal immune systems?

Motivated by this thread I did a blog post on the topic. A number of pathogens will grow in wort and then survive in the beer - but unless your sanitation really sucks the chances of this happening are low (plus, I'd suspect the beer would be downright nasty). Wild brews are a bit more risky - enteric bacteria and pathogenic yeast grow in the early stages of the brew and can survive for a long time afterwards. I've recovered viable pathogenic yeast (Rhodotorula & Cryptococcus) from wild ferments that were several months old.

I am unaware of any pathogen that will grow to any meaningful extend in fermented wort, but growth in the beer is not a pre-requisite for pathogenicity - in fact, most food borne pathogens will stop growing when they enter our bodies in order to alter there gene-expression profiles to become pathogenic. All that growth in the beer does is increase the likelyhood of being infected through increasing the number of viable bacteria/fungi/etc in the beer.

Bryan

 

[MarathonMurse]

I learned the hard way it will ferment. 3l camelback full of gator aid sitting in the back of the jeep for a week before I went to clean it out. It had fermented enough to burst the bag and leak gator aid all over the tub of my jeep. BTW it will grow mold in about that time to.

Hmm... then I guess my first homebrew was actually the 2-liter of lipton brisk I took a few drinks out of, then lost in the closet when I was 12.

 

[fearwig]

And that guy who died... was me.





*ghost noises*


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[Rhumbline]

Hmm... then I guess my first homebrew was actually the 2-liter of lipton brisk I took a few drinks out of, then lost in the closet when I was 12.

And what were you doing drinking Brisk in the closet when you were 12?

Not that there's anything wrong with that...