I'm not going to be convinced unless I also hear a biochemical mechanism, and I can't imagine where digestion of yeast and metabolization of alcohol intersect.
Despite the rather juvenile headline, I found this pretty interesting. Makes a lot of sense for someone that does a lot of beer tasting and wants to stay coherent.
If you manage to increase the concentration of alcohol in your stomach to levels when ADH2 kicks in (and keep sugar concentration low), it might work. But where is the fun in drinking without getting drunk?!
Because as someone who is very sensitive to alcohol, I have spent my adult life resisting pressure to drink more. I often end up with 2 day hangovers, because yet again I have allowed someone to convince me that one more drink won't hurt. If this works I will be using it...
Be sure to read the rest of this thread (and possibly the link to the Reddit discussion), it seems that while it might prevent drunkness, it doesn't do much to prevent the hangover part.
There are occasions where you want to get drunk and other occasions where you want others to be drunk. Especially when you are a lightweight and have to go out with people from the office etc. Lots of opportunities there.
I'd love nothing more than to be able to drink without getting drunk. Being able to knock back a bottle of wine with dinner and then a second bottle after dinner without any side effects would be dream come true. I love the pleasurable effects of alcohol as much as the next person, but 4 times out of 5 I'm only after the flavor and being forced to stop drinking something that tastes awesome due to the effect it's about to have on me totally sucks.
The best non-alcoholic beers are, relatively speaking, better than non-alcoholic wine, but the selection is basically limited to fairly mundane German style lagers and even the best ones (Jever is probably the best I've tasted) are inferior to even most mass-produced lager.
Clausthaller (not the canned), Paulaner Helles and Hefe-Weiß, Erdinger Weiß, Lämmbrau, and Hacker Pschorr Helles are all very tasty tipples. Spaten Helles is wretched, and Löwenbrau Helles is surprisingly not too terrible, given the regular stuff is garbage.
The non-alcoholic Erdinger Weissbier is probably the best non-alcoholic beer I've tasted.
You need to get "into" it a little before you realize it actually does taste like beer, except without the alcohol, and how much part of the flavour alcohol actually is (even with the relatively low 5% ABV that most beers are).
Also, and this may differ per regulations where you are, but many "non-alcoholic" beers do in fact contain up to 0.5% alcohol (including the Erdinger Weizener). So you'd have to drink 10 of them to feel the buzz of one normal beer, but I'd expect by that time you'd be feeling something else, over the buzz from a single beer :-P
I've had extremely low alcohol wine that tastes pretty close to every other glass of wine I've had. (But then I'm someone who thinks most wine tastes the same.)
Flavor-wise they range from not very good to absolutely terrible, kind of defeating the whole purpose. Even the very best non-alcoholic wines are only marginally better than the very worst alcoholic wines.
It's also not available at every bar/restaurant you go to. Shame though. If governments were serious about combating the abuse of alcohol they should make it mandatory (including on tap).
> I love the pleasurable effects of alcohol as much as the next person, but 4 times out of 5 I'm only after the flavor
I wonder how much of your perception of the "awesome" flavor is skewed by the pleasurable effects of alcohol, though. Like, the more you drink, the happier you get, and the happier you are, the better everything tastes.
Right, so why would you want to waste good wine when everything tastes great? From experience, the more intoxicated I get, the lower my capacity for actually enjoying what I'm drinking is. The best time for tasting is your very first drink, all downhill from there.
I find almost the opposite. The first couple of glasses of beer or wine of the evening is almost always the one that tastes the best. At the end of a long evening of drinking things just taste less and more muted and I'm far more happy drinking 'less good' drinks than I would be at the beginning of the evening.
It may also be that he just paces better and has a higher tolerance than most. There can also be other "side effects" of downing 1 serving of yeast + yogurt per beer you plan to have so perhaps that helps limit his intake as well (if he sticks to the pre-plan), heck pre-planning probably helps more than anything.
Not only that, but ingesting large amounts of live yeast can (does)cause explosive gastrointestinal results. A problem familiar to any home brewer that has consumed especially yeasty young beer.
If you get yeast in your intestines and you're taking antibiotics, you can get what's called Auto-Brewery Syndrome. The yeast in your intestines starts to ferment sugars and you get drunk all the time.
I had a friend who told me that drinking a glass of milk before a night of drinking was the special secret. Either way "drinking all night and not getting drunk" sounds more like a Twilight Zone episode to me. I don't really drink at all, but it sounds like that would be a nightmare.
I'm also wondering about how he deals with the inevitable farts? Yeasts eating sugars = gas which is why beer and everything else is fizzy.
Or tea. It's surprisingly refreshing, and contains some of the bitterness that beer has, but plain water lacks. Now, how about a nice black tea with some aromatic hops for finish. Delicious, nutritious, and non-intoxicating.
I've said this in the corresponding reddit threads in /r/beer and /r/homebrewing, but I've met Jim Koch on multiple occasions in multiple settings, and I've never seen him not hammered. He's a functioning alcoholic, not a magician.
He is, however, brilliant. He gets beer and marketing beer better than anybody else I've ever met.
Yeah, coming up with tricks to "not get drunk", or searching for cheap booze deals, or anything that is really just out of the way burdensome for the sake of nothing more than "more drink".
I don't buy cheap beer, ever. Not even if I'm asked to get a case for a party. If I'm going to drink, I want something I'll enjoy. Cheap beer is about getting a buzz or getting drunk. It always freaks people out, "you shouldn't have spent so much for a party". Why? I don't see it as a choice. Should I have only opened a can of kidney beans for the dish I brought, too? No, I want to have something that I will enjoy, that others can enjoy, too. It's not just about "filling ourselves to the gills on as little money as possible." But that is how people treat beer.
That's not to say I don't get drunk sometimes. The experience of sitting in an innertube on a lazy river is significantly enhanced by alcohol. A wedding party is significantly enhanced by copious alchol. But most days I want to be productive and make things. I can't code or write well--and certainly can't solder at all--when I'm drunk. I similarly don't watch a lot of television, or read a lot of books. I'd like to fill my time with more productive tasks than consumptive ones.
I agree with your reasoning and preferences, but some of us just like cheap beer for the taste. In Northern California a lot of the breweries focus on hoppy flavors, which I don't prefer. I'll just take a bud. My reasoning? Why pay for expensive beer! A bud tastes fine.
In years past, when I went out to bars a lot, I had a few classes of drinks I would buy, depending on my purpose for the night. If I intended to drive home a few hours later after playing some pool, I would just order Bud Light. I was able to drink for the social aspect, it quenched any thirst I had, and at a slow pace because I was playing a lot of pool, it didn't end up intoxicating me all that much. If I didn't have to worry about my ride at all, I would order a more flavorful beer.
I also find cheap American beer to be ideal for the beach.
>I'll just take a bud. My reasoning? Why pay for expensive beer! A bud tastes fine
Can't help but read your reply in a thick southern accent. Personally, if I'm aiming for an aggressive, high volume night, I'll take a busch over a bud.
Wasn't expecting this in the comments, but super appreciated. The hops arms race must end. I hope we will all go back to drinking delicious, sessionable lagers soon and realize the IPA/microbrew snobbery mindset so prevalent today is a big mistake, both socially (alienating to the uninitiated and highfalutin) and for the beer drinker's palette (overwhelming, masking flavors).
For what it's worth, the microbrewery scene doesn't have to be what it is today. At it's best it would just be a huge range of subtly different beers to give people more things to explore and find a favorite. As is, there's this undying devotion to IPAs and ever-hoppier tastes. There's nothing wrong with non-microbrew, but I'd be happiest of all to see microbreweries open up to exploring more of the possibilities for beer.
As someone who isn't big on too-much-hops, I've been able to find plenty of interesting microbrews without. As much as I'd certainly a shift away from the so much hops, you needn't feel deprived even in this environment if you keep your eye out.
As to hops, for myself I do enjoy extremely hoppy beers, just not nearly as much as I enjoy less hoppy beers.
No, I want to have something that I will enjoy, that others can enjoy, too.
It's worth noting that the "appreciation" of fine beers, wines and spirits is often an excuse to inebriate while convincing oneself that it's actually a higher pursuit. The simple exercise of bifurcating products by price, and assuming that correlates with quality, is flawed.
Thinking through friends and peers, the ones who show the greatest specialization of their drink (only the finest vintages and best, small-brewer beers and long aged bourbon) are the ones who drink the most. But it is shrouded by a classy veneer.
Anything can be taken to an extreme, but there's a lot of room in the middle for exactly what he's saying.
I rarely drink more than one beer in a sitting. But if the only thing being offered is Budweiser or similar, it'll be zero. I don't take it to an extreme, and am perfectly happy with a Sam Adams or similar decent big names, but I'm not going to waste the calories on something awful.
It's not a matter of "a higher pursuit", just a matter of taste, no different from preferring to drink nothing than, say, Mountain Dew.
Sure there is, but I'm replying specifically to their comment that-
"Cheap beer is about getting a buzz or getting drunk."
Cheap and expensive beer are made with close to identical processes, with the same controls and outcomes. Often beers are "cheap" purely as a function of the scale of the operation, but they still use the same quality ingredients and processes.
People often buy cheap beer because they actually prefer it (just as many, many people prefer lighter beer, which is something that many of my Canadian countrymen can't understand), or because the taste differences are so small that they can't justify the extra expense.
When you find yourself in the position of differentiating yourself from those other people -- that your own drinking is more cultured and justified -- it's time to take a step back and seriously contemplate things, because it's almost always a cover.
I don't know what accounts for it, but cheap bear definitely does not have the same outcomes. Budweiser, Coors, etc. are just not very good.
You're right that tastes can vary. Some people do prefer the cheap stuff, somehow.
But you're applying a blatant double standard here. You're saying that we should realize that some people prefer the cheap stuff, and then simultaneously turning around and saying that "almost always" preferring the expensive stuff is a cover. No, it's just taste.
You have to decide: is it legitimate to prefer different kinds of beer, or is it a cover? If it's a cover, it has to work both ways. If it's not, then you can't accuse people who don't want to drink Miller Lite of being secret alcoholics just because they want something that costs more than 50 cents a can.
There is no double standard at play here. The guy who likes <some craft beer> has found something he appreciates and enjoys, and there is nothing wrong with that.
The guy who elevates himself above the hordes and their cheap beer, on the other hand...it isn't really about the product anymore.
cheap bear definitely does not have the same outcomes.
Some products aren't filtered as much. Some have different blends of ingredients. Some are fermented more or less. And so on. But those things seldom impact the actual price in any material fashion, instead are subjective choices of the brewer based upon their market.
Filtering is interesting, because at one point the premium products (in many categories -- beers, wines, coffee, etc) earned their position because they were filtered more, while the cheap swill of the masses where the slurry products full of bits and grinds. As filtering became mainstream and inexpensive, unfiltered and raw -- doing less -- became the sign of a premium product.
Maple syrup was original graded based on its use as a sugar substitute, so the lightest least maple-y syrup was given the highest grade, and the stuff that actually tastes like maple syrup is not the Grade A stuff.
I've wondered about this for a long time. It's made me feel weird liking the "lower-grade" maple syrup more. I want all the maple-y goodness, not just sugary liquid. Thanks for pointing that out, didn't think I'd learn that in a beer thread.
That's like saying a home made burger from top notch ingredients is made with close to identical processes as a McDonald's one. Except of course that they use worse ingredients and cut on all possible costs as long as it still tastes kind of burger-like.
Unless you disagree that they for example replace a lot of the barley with rice and corn - I don't really see how can you claim it's the same thing.
"Unless you disagree that they for example replace a lot of the barley with rice and corn"
The ingredient lists of the "cheap" beers were, in most cases, set in the 1800s, and remain unchanged. And they were set when rice was much more expensive in the US. And indeed even today rice is neck and neck with barley -- they aren't saving a penny using rice. Instead it was used specifically because it gave a lighter taste, because, again and amazingly, this is a preference of many drinkers. Many Japanese beers are heavy on the rice, and are considered "premium" products for it.
The notions of expensive versus cheap as a patron of a brand are often completely detached from reality.
This isn't true. See the ingredients in your cheap beer. You will see: "Non malted cereals", that is, rice and transgenic corn. More a lot of conservants.
> Thinking through friends and peers, the ones who show the greatest specialization of their drink (only the finest vintages and best, small-brewer beers and long aged bourbon) are the ones who drink the most. But it is shrouded by a classy veneer.
I come from a place where people will polish a 24 in a night. I have an appreciation for fine spirits, but I don't think that I "drink the most," and additionally, when I drink, it's more to enjoy the liquor, then get hammered (though, I do that, too). My appreciation comes from drinking a varied variety of beer, rather than just the same thing ad infinitum.
I'm not sure you know what a dichotomy is, but alcoholics span the range from functioning to absolutely crippled, and everywhere in between. Alcoholism is a dependence on and addiction to alcohol. No more, no less.
Jim Koch is able to function fairly well as an alcoholic that many people wouldn't be able to because of the industry he's in.
And as to your other comment, unfortunately, I'm all too familiar with alcoholism and its many forms. There's no such thing as "true alcoholism," there's just addiction.
I have 2 counter examples. My wife's step father would come home from his sales job and drink glass after glass of whiskey and coke. Each was about 15 ounces of whiskey with 1 ounce of coke to give it color (trying to hide how much he drinks). He's a good provider and only a little emotionally abusive to his family. The other example is the woman my wife works with. She is a contract-medical coder that is faster and better than anyone else in the company. She also drinks a bottle of wine with the meal she doesn't eat every night. She is the best employee my wife has as long as she's not in the hospital for electrolyte imbalance.
I don't think you know what a real alcoholic looks like.
Edit: Alcoholism isn't just drinking alcohol all of the time. It is a life threatening and often fatal disease. True alcoholics destroy their lives and the lives of everyone around them.
So downvote me all you want but people who have no experience with the powers of addiction should keep their petty labeling to themself.
The OP is making a blanket statement about a man he has apparently met a few times, and even states that he goes around to various other forums stating the same thing. In my opinion that is extremely rude.
I don't know if you're being snarky or trolling or what but alcoholism comes in many forms. Please don't diminish the situation people are in just because they do their job well.
Just because he drinks a lot (note that this is also part of his profession) doesn't make him an alcoholic.
People love to toss the term around lightly. If you've ever lived with a true alcoholic then you know it's not something to be joked about and it is a life threatening disease.
How would you feel if everyone in this thread was non-chalantly calling John Koch a junkie.
And there is your problem. You think others must be 'joking' when they call someone an alcoholic while that person isn't obviously destroying his life. You are wrong.
News flash: the fact that you know worse cases doesn't mean the less severe cases aren't bad and it doesn't mean that people calling out those cases are joking. Grandparent was saying Jim Koch is drinking in a way that has severe negative consequences for his long-term health.
There are a whole lot of people that are indeed functioning alcoholics: they don't drink themselves into a stupor, but they are constantly buzzed, which has long-term health consequences and impacts their effective personality and behavior in (usually) a bad way.
I appreciate that you are trying to raise awareness of more severe, or at least more violent, alcoholism, but at the same time, you are raising denial other forms of alcoholism.
High-functioning alcoholics... "Have difficulty viewing themselves as alcoholics because they do not fit the stereotypical image and because they feel their lives are manageable, [and] avoid recovery help."
Saying that people who are high-functioning are not real alcoholics is just going to make them even less likely to admit they have a problem and seek help.
Both types of alcoholism are important and trying to raise awareness of one by denying the other is not helpful to alcoholics of either type.
I'm a high functioning alcoholic, and denial is extraordinarily strong amongst us (other HFAs). Denial is just another enabler to being essentially blotto all the time.
I lived in complete denial for 15 years before some of my HFA buddies started burning their lives down in rather spectacular ways.
I didn't want my life to serve as a warning to others, so I quit. Luckily, I didn't lose anything along the way, but many have, even many of the HFA's I used to know.
I'm sorry - two disconnected thoughts typed too quickly. He is a pioneering brewer, but based on some of the stories about him drinking so much every night it's hard to imagine him not being an alcoholic.
That's funny, I stopped in to say the same thing. At an "extreme" (high gravity) beer festival in Boston a few years ago he was more intoxicated than my wife and I, and yet managed to make perfect sense. (Maybe I was just too drunk to tell the difference?)
A clever piece of marketing. The hip trend is away from IPAs and towards Belgians, specifically Quads. In this article I learned that Jim Koch, founder of Sam Adams is sick of IPAs and wants a good Belgian(he's hip kids!). Sure enough, his company makes a Quad and a stout! Man, Sam Adams is cool again!
Protip: Prefer alcohol-free beverages. Works all the time.
Alcohol doesn't bring anything to the table except a false sense of belonging and elation. If you need to do that ALL NIGHT to feel good around friends and people in general, then you might need to sit down and ask yourself some serious questions.
This might prevent you from getting drunk, but the result is going to be some terrible gas. Anyone who homebrews will know this because of those times you've drank beer that still had tons of yeast in suspension or when they accidentally drank the sediment.
Not recalling all the details of my physiology here, but there is an additional ethanol metabolism pathway that is not engaged or not fully engaged until someone is very very drunk or is chronically pretty damn drunk. IIRC, the enzyme involved does not put out the same toxins through oxidation that affect the nervous system and give that drunk look. Instead you get the 'functional alcoholic'.
Based on what other people are saying here, my guess is, that's what we've got going on here. My common sense says there is probably a measurable, but insignificant effect by the enzyme in the yeast.
Edit: also, the theory is just that the stomach is a mixing bowl, so the poor man's field test is here is pretty trivial, maybe I'll have some fun tonight with a blender, some yeast, and a bottle of cheap hooch.
Skeptics StackExchange has a good takedown of this. TL;DR: Yeast ADH requires a neutral to alkaline environment to work, but the stomach is extremely acidic, so it's not going to do anything.
What about the small intestine? I'm reading that about 80% of alcohol is absorbed there after leaving the stomach and that most of the small intestine has pH between 7-8.
I go to many craft beer festivals just to "taste" new beers. My main goal when attending beer festivals isn't to get drunk, but to taste a diverse list of new beers. It would be a big win for me if I could sample more and get drunk less.
If your goal sincerely is to taste more instead of feeling the effects of alcohol, why not spit the beer out? This is de rigueur among serious wine tasters for exactly this reason.
I have had great luck doing strenuous exercise, drinking moderate amount of water and taking some vitamin b 4-6 hours before drinking. Seems to double my tolerance.
Not a doctor so im just speculating, but wouldn't the ADH still be rendered useless when it goes through the stomach on the way to the small intestine? Perhaps this means it would work going the other direction, lol.
Not necessarily, you'd be surprised just how hardy both the yeast granules (really sporulated yeast) and ADH can be. I've actually done some research in this area (for unrelated reasons) but here's the a "must read" paper from 1975 if you're curious: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1165444/
"were studied in the pH range 4.9--9.9 at 25 degrees C and in the temperature range 14.8--43.5 degrees C at pH 7.05."
Forgive me if I am missing something obvious, but isn't that outside the range of a typical stomach's pH range? If so, how does this study relate to the conditions inside a stomach?
Im basing these questions on what I saw in that skeptic.exchange link posted above, again im a total layman.
Stomach pH ranges between 1-5, what you eat contributes significantly to the variance in pH. The "active" yeast that's sold is actually the inactive spore (not actively budding) and low pH environments promote staying inactive. ADH is produced by metabolically active yeast, which theoretically would be yeast that reaches your intestines (indeed, we have "native" yeast in our intestinal tract).
Whether or not yeast would make it that far and then being to bud and produce ADH again, I couldn't really say. I never looked at human-ingestion of colonies.
ADH itself can be denatured in low pH environments but will renature and self-fold into an active tertiary structure when brought back to neutral/slightly basic pH.
Are you sure the enzyme would need to operate in an acidic environment?
Intact yeast cell membranes would be pretty capable of keeping ions out (thus some pH isolation), but I imagine they would be more permeable to small relatively uncharged substances as ethanol.
I see no immediate reason why not many of the yeast cell might act tiny bioreactors, keeping a somewhat controlled internal environment, where ethanol might diffuse in and be degraded. Can someone here think of any reason for why this would not be plausible?
Not an expert here, but what about good old olive oil? There is a rumor that drinking a couple of teaspoons of oil before driking will make it longer to absorb the alcohol and you might get less drunk. I wonder how true is that technique. ..
Same as non-caloric foods I guess. The taste. I would love to drink beer at work. But getting drunk is not what I want. Some people like wine like that. I doubt that stands for spirits.
I think this is probably broscience bullshit. Yeasts produce ethanol from sugars and tend to leave a lot of excess lying around when they finish.
If you want a biological assistant, what you really want is to swallow the "mother of vinegar" acetobacter culture biofilm from unpasteurized, naturally fermented vinegar, and eat it with something dense and sugary before you drink. The acetobacters actually metabolize ethanol into acetic acid and survive in highly acidic environments such as the stomach. As they are aerobic bacteria, you will also need to swallow air while drinking. The amount of time that alcohol remains in your stomach makes it unlikely that you will make more than a tiny difference in the amount of alcohol that enters your bloodstream.
But it is much more scientifically plausible than baker's yeast.
An actual, significant reduction in drunkenness from ingested alcohol would have to overstock the liver with ADH1B, thiamine (vitamin B1), ALDH2, ACSS2, and n-acetyl-L-cysteine (Acetadote). This would require an intravenous injection before you start drinking, and is probably very dangerous in the absence of any real medical necessity.
Serious question: What is the purpose of "drinking all night" and not getting drunk? To me, the phrase "all night" implies "a lot" or at least "relatively frequently during the course of the evening".
Why would you want to drink a bunch of alcohol and not get drunk? If not becoming drunk was the goal, why wouldn't you just, you know, drink something non-alcoholic?
Never suffered from hangover, but I have read about it. It seems to be mostly dehydration. If you drink one glass of water for each time you urinated the night you drank before you go to sleep I wonder if your hydration level would be the same.
Might be. Think there might be some psychology too.
Sometimes I'll go out to a bar and get absolutely shitfaced drunk (8 double G&Ts, for instance) and wake up the next morning feeling fine. I'll pour myself one drink at home before bed and wake up the next morning feeling like death.
A bit of energy exertion to walk to the bus stop and get home may have made all the difference.
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[ 6.0 ms ] story [ 199 ms ] threadIf you manage to increase the concentration of alcohol in your stomach to levels when ADH2 kicks in (and keep sugar concentration low), it might work. But where is the fun in drinking without getting drunk?!
You need to get "into" it a little before you realize it actually does taste like beer, except without the alcohol, and how much part of the flavour alcohol actually is (even with the relatively low 5% ABV that most beers are).
Also, and this may differ per regulations where you are, but many "non-alcoholic" beers do in fact contain up to 0.5% alcohol (including the Erdinger Weizener). So you'd have to drink 10 of them to feel the buzz of one normal beer, but I'd expect by that time you'd be feeling something else, over the buzz from a single beer :-P
I wonder how much of your perception of the "awesome" flavor is skewed by the pleasurable effects of alcohol, though. Like, the more you drink, the happier you get, and the happier you are, the better everything tastes.
One question for chemists or biologists out there: If the byproduct of the yeast is acetaldehyde, wouldn't that cause the uncomfortable "Asian Flush"? (http://bsclarified.wordpress.com/2011/11/18/im-not-drunk-i-j...)
http://www.reddit.com/r/Homebrewing/comments/23wbeo/jim_koch...
It may also be that he just paces better and has a higher tolerance than most. There can also be other "side effects" of downing 1 serving of yeast + yogurt per beer you plan to have so perhaps that helps limit his intake as well (if he sticks to the pre-plan), heck pre-planning probably helps more than anything.
- people who know him personally say he's wasted ALL the time
- mechanism of action is supposed to be ADH that is added to the bakers' yeast
- microbiologists and chemists doubt it's going to work
"To be honest, I think when we were talking to him, he was already few drinks in. But yes he is a very nice man, he was joking with us and stuff."
"Bartenders hate him"
I'm also wondering about how he deals with the inevitable farts? Yeasts eating sugars = gas which is why beer and everything else is fizzy.
Come to think of it, this does sound good.
He is, however, brilliant. He gets beer and marketing beer better than anybody else I've ever met.
Unless you're the most famous brewer in the world -- then I suppose it might be easy to miss that sign.
I don't buy cheap beer, ever. Not even if I'm asked to get a case for a party. If I'm going to drink, I want something I'll enjoy. Cheap beer is about getting a buzz or getting drunk. It always freaks people out, "you shouldn't have spent so much for a party". Why? I don't see it as a choice. Should I have only opened a can of kidney beans for the dish I brought, too? No, I want to have something that I will enjoy, that others can enjoy, too. It's not just about "filling ourselves to the gills on as little money as possible." But that is how people treat beer.
That's not to say I don't get drunk sometimes. The experience of sitting in an innertube on a lazy river is significantly enhanced by alcohol. A wedding party is significantly enhanced by copious alchol. But most days I want to be productive and make things. I can't code or write well--and certainly can't solder at all--when I'm drunk. I similarly don't watch a lot of television, or read a lot of books. I'd like to fill my time with more productive tasks than consumptive ones.
I also find cheap American beer to be ideal for the beach.
Can't help but read your reply in a thick southern accent. Personally, if I'm aiming for an aggressive, high volume night, I'll take a busch over a bud.
New Belgium has Shift ( http://www.newbelgium.com/beer/detail.aspx?id=fc35795d-8d9d-... ) as a good session beer.
Fort Collins Brewery has a nice list of less hoppy beers:
http://www.fortcollinsbrewery.com/brews/red-banshee/
I like that I can still get the crazy IPAs, but there's a ton of other good stuff to drink too.
As to hops, for myself I do enjoy extremely hoppy beers, just not nearly as much as I enjoy less hoppy beers.
It's worth noting that the "appreciation" of fine beers, wines and spirits is often an excuse to inebriate while convincing oneself that it's actually a higher pursuit. The simple exercise of bifurcating products by price, and assuming that correlates with quality, is flawed.
Thinking through friends and peers, the ones who show the greatest specialization of their drink (only the finest vintages and best, small-brewer beers and long aged bourbon) are the ones who drink the most. But it is shrouded by a classy veneer.
I rarely drink more than one beer in a sitting. But if the only thing being offered is Budweiser or similar, it'll be zero. I don't take it to an extreme, and am perfectly happy with a Sam Adams or similar decent big names, but I'm not going to waste the calories on something awful.
It's not a matter of "a higher pursuit", just a matter of taste, no different from preferring to drink nothing than, say, Mountain Dew.
"Cheap beer is about getting a buzz or getting drunk."
Cheap and expensive beer are made with close to identical processes, with the same controls and outcomes. Often beers are "cheap" purely as a function of the scale of the operation, but they still use the same quality ingredients and processes.
People often buy cheap beer because they actually prefer it (just as many, many people prefer lighter beer, which is something that many of my Canadian countrymen can't understand), or because the taste differences are so small that they can't justify the extra expense.
When you find yourself in the position of differentiating yourself from those other people -- that your own drinking is more cultured and justified -- it's time to take a step back and seriously contemplate things, because it's almost always a cover.
You're right that tastes can vary. Some people do prefer the cheap stuff, somehow.
But you're applying a blatant double standard here. You're saying that we should realize that some people prefer the cheap stuff, and then simultaneously turning around and saying that "almost always" preferring the expensive stuff is a cover. No, it's just taste.
You have to decide: is it legitimate to prefer different kinds of beer, or is it a cover? If it's a cover, it has to work both ways. If it's not, then you can't accuse people who don't want to drink Miller Lite of being secret alcoholics just because they want something that costs more than 50 cents a can.
The guy who elevates himself above the hordes and their cheap beer, on the other hand...it isn't really about the product anymore.
cheap bear definitely does not have the same outcomes.
Some products aren't filtered as much. Some have different blends of ingredients. Some are fermented more or less. And so on. But those things seldom impact the actual price in any material fashion, instead are subjective choices of the brewer based upon their market.
Filtering is interesting, because at one point the premium products (in many categories -- beers, wines, coffee, etc) earned their position because they were filtered more, while the cheap swill of the masses where the slurry products full of bits and grinds. As filtering became mainstream and inexpensive, unfiltered and raw -- doing less -- became the sign of a premium product.
Unless you disagree that they for example replace a lot of the barley with rice and corn - I don't really see how can you claim it's the same thing.
"Unless you disagree that they for example replace a lot of the barley with rice and corn"
The ingredient lists of the "cheap" beers were, in most cases, set in the 1800s, and remain unchanged. And they were set when rice was much more expensive in the US. And indeed even today rice is neck and neck with barley -- they aren't saving a penny using rice. Instead it was used specifically because it gave a lighter taste, because, again and amazingly, this is a preference of many drinkers. Many Japanese beers are heavy on the rice, and are considered "premium" products for it.
The notions of expensive versus cheap as a patron of a brand are often completely detached from reality.
I come from a place where people will polish a 24 in a night. I have an appreciation for fine spirits, but I don't think that I "drink the most," and additionally, when I drink, it's more to enjoy the liquor, then get hammered (though, I do that, too). My appreciation comes from drinking a varied variety of beer, rather than just the same thing ad infinitum.
[W]hen I drink, it's more to enjoy the liquor than get hammered.
Hmmm . . . is it the former or the latter?
Jim Koch is able to function fairly well as an alcoholic that many people wouldn't be able to because of the industry he's in.
And as to your other comment, unfortunately, I'm all too familiar with alcoholism and its many forms. There's no such thing as "true alcoholism," there's just addiction.
Edit: Alcoholism isn't just drinking alcohol all of the time. It is a life threatening and often fatal disease. True alcoholics destroy their lives and the lives of everyone around them.
So downvote me all you want but people who have no experience with the powers of addiction should keep their petty labeling to themself.
The OP is making a blanket statement about a man he has apparently met a few times, and even states that he goes around to various other forums stating the same thing. In my opinion that is extremely rude.
People love to toss the term around lightly. If you've ever lived with a true alcoholic then you know it's not something to be joked about and it is a life threatening disease.
How would you feel if everyone in this thread was non-chalantly calling John Koch a junkie.
News flash: the fact that you know worse cases doesn't mean the less severe cases aren't bad and it doesn't mean that people calling out those cases are joking. Grandparent was saying Jim Koch is drinking in a way that has severe negative consequences for his long-term health.
There are a whole lot of people that are indeed functioning alcoholics: they don't drink themselves into a stupor, but they are constantly buzzed, which has long-term health consequences and impacts their effective personality and behavior in (usually) a bad way.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-functioning_alcoholic
High-functioning alcoholics... "Have difficulty viewing themselves as alcoholics because they do not fit the stereotypical image and because they feel their lives are manageable, [and] avoid recovery help."
Saying that people who are high-functioning are not real alcoholics is just going to make them even less likely to admit they have a problem and seek help.
Both types of alcoholism are important and trying to raise awareness of one by denying the other is not helpful to alcoholics of either type.
You are right there is definitely a wide range of addiction and I shouldn't have indicated there wasn't.
In retrospect it was really just an emotional response to the OP labeling Koch an alcoholic.
I lived in complete denial for 15 years before some of my HFA buddies started burning their lives down in rather spectacular ways.
I didn't want my life to serve as a warning to others, so I quit. Luckily, I didn't lose anything along the way, but many have, even many of the HFA's I used to know.
I'd say the "hip trend" is (and has been) toward lactics/sours/reds and I don't think Sam Adams has anything invested in that yet.
Based on what other people are saying here, my guess is, that's what we've got going on here. My common sense says there is probably a measurable, but insignificant effect by the enzyme in the yeast.
Edit: also, the theory is just that the stomach is a mixing bowl, so the poor man's field test is here is pretty trivial, maybe I'll have some fun tonight with a blender, some yeast, and a bottle of cheap hooch.
http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/20381/does-eatin...
http://prevention.gwu.edu/alcohol-absorption
http://microbewiki.kenyon.edu/index.php/Small_Intestine
Anyway, I can't see the utility of drinking without the expected effects.
Forgive me if I am missing something obvious, but isn't that outside the range of a typical stomach's pH range? If so, how does this study relate to the conditions inside a stomach? Im basing these questions on what I saw in that skeptic.exchange link posted above, again im a total layman.
Edit: Thanks for the answers, aroch! :)
Whether or not yeast would make it that far and then being to bud and produce ADH again, I couldn't really say. I never looked at human-ingestion of colonies.
ADH itself can be denatured in low pH environments but will renature and self-fold into an active tertiary structure when brought back to neutral/slightly basic pH.
Intact yeast cell membranes would be pretty capable of keeping ions out (thus some pH isolation), but I imagine they would be more permeable to small relatively uncharged substances as ethanol.
I see no immediate reason why not many of the yeast cell might act tiny bioreactors, keeping a somewhat controlled internal environment, where ethanol might diffuse in and be degraded. Can someone here think of any reason for why this would not be plausible?
I already do!
Same as playing poker even if you're not very good at it, and know you're going to lose.
If you want a biological assistant, what you really want is to swallow the "mother of vinegar" acetobacter culture biofilm from unpasteurized, naturally fermented vinegar, and eat it with something dense and sugary before you drink. The acetobacters actually metabolize ethanol into acetic acid and survive in highly acidic environments such as the stomach. As they are aerobic bacteria, you will also need to swallow air while drinking. The amount of time that alcohol remains in your stomach makes it unlikely that you will make more than a tiny difference in the amount of alcohol that enters your bloodstream.
But it is much more scientifically plausible than baker's yeast.
An actual, significant reduction in drunkenness from ingested alcohol would have to overstock the liver with ADH1B, thiamine (vitamin B1), ALDH2, ACSS2, and n-acetyl-L-cysteine (Acetadote). This would require an intravenous injection before you start drinking, and is probably very dangerous in the absence of any real medical necessity.
Why would you want to drink a bunch of alcohol and not get drunk? If not becoming drunk was the goal, why wouldn't you just, you know, drink something non-alcoholic?
The important thing is to avoid the hangover.
Sometimes I'll go out to a bar and get absolutely shitfaced drunk (8 double G&Ts, for instance) and wake up the next morning feeling fine. I'll pour myself one drink at home before bed and wake up the next morning feeling like death.
A bit of energy exertion to walk to the bus stop and get home may have made all the difference.
Double-blind randomized control trial or it didn't happen
Anyone?