Been wondering about this. I read somewhere that drinking mead while its fermenting was common practice in the old days.
However wouldnt it make you susceptible to developing a illness where your stomach begins to brew its own alcohol which causes you to be perpetually and mildly drunk?
It’s fine. It might be gross or sickly sweet, depending on how long it’s been fermenting.
Auto-brewery syndrome is super rare. It’s caused by conditions that allow brewing yeast (and other fermenting microbes) to live/thrive in your gut when they shouldn’t. Nutritional yeast is also living brewing yeast, though it’s dormant and not actively fermenting when eaten. You will get a bunch of B complex vitamins from the yeast!
But beware, my friends used to call green beer ‘fartzens,’ after the original Hefefartzen that we drank way too early.
Autobrewery syndrome is rare and probably has more to do with your diet and antibiotic use than consuming a few actively fermenting drinks.
Some drinks like pulque are traditionally drunk that way and that’s why they can’t be shipped long distances. So if its been done by other cultures for thousands if years, I’m not a doctor, but I’m gonna wager its fairly safe.
Autobrewery syndrome
Dang, I would have loved to have that syndrome 10 years ago. It certainly would have saved me a lot of money.
One of the key bits of fermentation is that the conditions need to be pretty close to perfect for yeast to be a dominant Factor. You need to have a relatively sterile environment, you definitely need to make sure that there’s nothing else competing, and you need to make sure that you’re within certain factors of things like acidity. Stomach acid has a pH of 1-2, most brewable juices are closer to 3-4.
Some microbes do end up surviving the journey through your stomach, and they become the microbiome inside of you. I think that brewer’s yeast would find that environment extremely challenging more than the stomach even because that microbiome is like skid row, filled with the dregs of the food you eat. The spoiled rich kid brewers yeast isn’t going to thrive in that environment.
Consider a piece of advice from cider brewing: you are sometimes told if you don’t have yeast to just juice the fruit without washing it and natural yeast on the fruit will grow in your cider and if you’re successful it’ll taste better than beer brewer’s yeast. This shows that yeast is everywhere and it’s on many things we might routinely eat and people aren’t going around naturally drunk after eating an apple off a tree or some berries off a bush.
Lots of drinks can be consumed this way, it is common here to drink wine (sold as “burčák”). So it is mostly ok, but some have diarrhea from it. I would say to don’t drink too much of it, it can make some digestive problems but nothing serious.
As the saying here:
- booze dilate veins
- wine spreads legs
- “burčák” spreads your butt
I drink kombucha several times a week and it’s still fermenting and haven’t had an issue
