A 61-year-old home brewer discovered he was able to make beer more easily than he thought, right in his gut.
The man was taken to a Texas emergency room after complaining of excessive dizziness. Nurses were shocked when he blew a 0.37 percent on a breathalyzer (five times his local legal driving limit), but he hadn't taken a sip of alcohol that day, NPR reported.
"He would get drunk out of the blue - on a Sunday morning after being at church, or really, just anytime," Barbara Cordell, the dean of nursing at Panola College in Carthage, Texas. "His wife was so dismayed about it that she even bought a Breathalyzer."
The medical staff didn't believe the man, and accused him of "closet drinking." The team decided to check out the situation anyway, and isolated him in a room for 24 hours, making sure he had no access to alcohol.
At one time during his isolation his levels rose to 0.12. Doctor's realized the self-brewer was not making up his symptoms.
The staff finally determined the man's surprise drunkenness was thanks to brewer's yeast called called saccharomyces cerevisiae that grew in his stomach before getting into his blood stream, which explained the tipsy symptoms, the Daily Mail reported.
"Gut Fermentation Syndrome also known as Auto-Brewery Syndrome is a relatively unknown phenomenon in modern medicine. Very few articles have been written on the syndrome and most of them are anecdotal," a report titled 'A Case Study of Gut Fermentation Syndrome (Auto-Brewery) with Saccharomyces cerevisiae as the Causative Organism," stated.
This type of yeast is found in food items such as bread, and obviously beer. It is usually harmless, and some people even take it as a probiotic supplement, but in some extremely rare cases it never leaves the gut, NPR reported.
"Researchers have shown unequivocally that Saccharomyces can grow in the intestinal tract," Dr. Joseph Heitman, a microbiologist at Duke University, told NPR. "But it's still unclear whether it's associated with any disease."
