A Texas man in his 60s who would become drunk without touching a drop of alcohol turns out to have had a beer gut — his gut was brewing beer.
The unusual case study of Gut Fermentation Syndrome, a relatively unknown phenomenon also known as Auto-Brewery, was published in the International Journal of Clinical Medicine.
Authors Barbara Cordell and Dr. Justin McCarthy detail how the man spent five years becoming unexplainably drunk before experts realized the cause was too much brewer’s yeast in his gut. A carbohydrate-rich diet caused an overgrowth of yeast, which would ferment the sugars into ethanol and make him drunk.