its hard to blame a food poisoning incident on one particular thing, but the only really out of the ordinary thing i had was a certain beer i made:
i was bottling about 3 weeks ago, and put the very last ~150ml of a 4.7% alcohol beer in a 355ml bottle. rather than leave it at that, i thought - “i’ll add water to the rest of it and see how it tastes when it carbonates”
that would make that beer about 2% alcohol, maybe less. it sat for 3 weeks at room temp.
i got quite strong stomach pains about 18 hours after drinking it. and they lasted for a full day and a half and are not mostly gone.
not sure if it was the beer or not, but something to consider or note. does anyone have an expert opinion?
Expert - having or involving authoritative knowledge.
With that, I can personally attest to the fact that beer can make you sick. Especially OPB (Other People’s Beer).
Many hours have been spent during my short lifetime with my head in the toilet (wow, that is not a pretty picture!), disgorging the contents of my stomach after imbibing a few too many.
But never (NEVER) have I gotten ill after consuming the beer that was brewed in my house.
I think it was just Gambrinus, the God of beer reminding you to never water down beer. He didn’t want to get full medieval on you because it’s 2020 and we are dealing with the Rona and so he just gave you a friendly kick in the pants and sidelined you for 18 hours with some mild gastro-intestinal distress. Let this be a lesson to all of us.
One of the things that keeps beer-spoiling microbes at bay in finished beer is low pH. A pH of around (IIRC) 4.6 or less has a protective effect. This is one of the (many) reasons breweries care about wort and beer pH.
When you diluted your sample with water, you probably increased the pH to above this protective threshold. You also reduced any protective effect of the alcohol and added oxygen to the beer. In other words, you removed the safeguards against the growth of unwanted microbes.
There are no known pathogens that can survive in beer, but that applies to normal, finished beer. I suppose it’s within the realm of possibility that you grew up an opportunistic pathogen in that bottle. That said, seems like that beer would have looked, smelled, or tasted odd if it was dangerous to drink. Were there any sensory indications that something was off with that bottle?
I have some questions. Did the beer smell or taste odd ? Did you have the whole beer if it smelled or tasted odd ? Why would you water down your beer ? I am going to take a stab in the dark here and say it wasn’t the beer.
it didn’t taste good, but not particularly odd in any way.
i watered it down to fill the last bottle and just see how it would turn out.
yes, im totally willing to entertain that possibility. im just mentioning this for any homebrewers who could consider this. if you watered beer down to 1% ABV, low IBU then you would definitely have potential for something to happen.
there was a thread on non-alcoholic homebrewed beer and the issue of extreme sanitation requirements was discussed.
Yeast can affect your gut. Many a morning I have woken with the s&*(s after drinking a few pints of a newly kegged beer where I’m sure I had a fair amount of yeast present that had settled to the bottom of the keg.
