Man Accidentally Brews Beer In His Gut

Guys, we've been getting drunk all wrong; turns out, you can brew beer in your own body, which is pretty much like getting alcohol for free.

NPR stumbled across the craziest case of "auto-brewery syndrome" in an issue of the International Journal of Clinical Medicine, where a 61-year-old man complained of getting dizzy and feeling drunk at random times during the day. The man, who has a history of home-brewing, walked into a Texas emergency room with a blood alcohol concentration of 0.37, although he claimed he hadn't had any alcohol that day.

"He would get drunk out of the blue — on a Sunday morning after being at church, or really, just anytime," Barabara Cordell, of Panola College in Carthage, Texas, told NPR. "His wife was so dismayed about it that she even bought a Breathalyzer."

The hospital quarantined the man for 24 hours, feeding him carbohydrate-rich foods and testing his blood for alcohol. His BAC rose 0.12 percent at one point.

Turns out, the man had what they've dubbed "auto-brewery syndrome," where an overabundance of yeast in his gut was brewing up alcohol, processing starch to ferment the sugars into ethanol. And while this might sound awesome, we can imagine getting drunk without being able to control it is probably a huge annoyance. We retract our lede.