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this is about the craziest thing I've ever read
Go extra-hyper-local with your home brew by making beer inside your bellyMedical mystery time: A 61-year-old man in Texas kept getting drunk, which doesn’t sound mysterious at all, except that he said he hadn’t been drinking. It was enough a problem that his doctors decided to keep him in a hospital room, without booze, for 24 hours. He still got drunk, and they were finally able to figure out what was going on: Brewer’s yeast had colonized his gut, and were brewing a beer inside his intestines.
So when he ate or drank a bunch of starch — a bagel, pasta or even a soda — the yeast fermented the sugars into ethanol, and he would get drunk. Essentially, he was brewing beer in his own gut.
Don’t worry, home brewers: It’s not common enough to be a threat to your industry. In fact, NPR’s reporters were skeptical that this condition was real at all, but they found another doctor who confirmed that this was possible and few other cases:
We dug around the scant literature on auto-brewery syndrome and uncovered a handful of cases similar to the one in Texas. Some reports in Japan date back to the 1970s. In most instances, the infections occurred after a person took antibiotics — which can wipe out the bacteria in the gut, making room for fungi like yeast to flourish — or had another illness that suppresses their immune system.
Link: http://grist.org/list/go-extra-hyper-local-with-your-home-brew-by-making-beer-inside-your-belly/
23 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
Is it common enough to reproduce at home 
I have felt guilty for YEARS regarding something that 'could have been' a medically related.
About 30 years ago when I lived near Dallas I was taking a couple medical related classes.
I had a "Physicians' Desk Reference" book in the house that I used for my homework.
I used to thumb through the book and read all sorts of interesting entries.
One day on the TV news they were talking about a man that had been arrested in Fort Worth or Arlington Texas or somewhere over there a bit west of where I was (I can't remember exactly where now) - and they said that he had been arrested due to his young daughter having 'burns' on her body which 'looked' like he had put her in a scalding tub of hot water. In the news report they said that he was distraught and vehemently sworn up and down that he had done no such thing.
I panicked.
A few week before I heard the news on the TV news I had read an entry in the Physicians' Desk Reference that described a disease that made the skin appear as if it had been burnt in tub of hot water.
I frantically searched through the book looking for what I had read weeks before and never could find it.
I thought that if I had found it that I would call the D.A. and let them know that perhaps the man was telling the truth.
I have wondered from time to time over the years about what ever happened to that man and if he had actually done something to his daughter or if it was a medical problem that had never been diagnosed.
But for some inexplicable reason he's having a hard time finding investors to fund the surgery so he can bottle his Colon Beer. 
I think even the lowliest, most hardcore drunkard would stick to mouthwash.
He probably could keep costs down by modifying an old label and just calling it 'Belly Beer'. At least it might go over a little better than 'Colostomy Beer'.
