My big pile o' big boxes o' shit, OR: Can you get sick from homebrewing?

I'm spending this rainy Saturday afternoon the same way I spent Friday night: going through boxes of old papers and shit. While I'm getting much, much better at it, I have long had this bad habit of hanging on to old pieces of random papers, receipts, and so on.

J hates it. She calls them "*****'s pile". Occasionally these piles get thrown into a box, labeled with a year, and tossed carelessly into a closet, garage, or the middle of the living room. The great thing about these boxes is that many of them have been consolidated multiple times over the years, so some of them have scraps of paper from college, and high school. That's right: I have letters and notes and other goodies dating to the late 1980s.

For about the last six months, J has been employing what I would call the passive stick approach: she was hoping that leaving the pile of twelve or so boxes in a big stack in the living room would cause me to do something about them. Ha! I just ignore them, and we both treat the pile like a weird piece of pomo furniture, and so there they have sat for half a year. Recently J switched to what I'll term the active carrot approach, asking me what schedule I'd agree to to go through the boxes (preferably discarding most of their contents) and what prize I wanted for each box. I negotiated a two boxes per month schedule, and J has to personally go get a keg filled and bring it back for every box I do. Pretty sweet, huh?

I may or may not do multiple posts with the little gems I'm coming across. Here's today's gem, relating to the oft-asked question "can you get sick from homebrew?" Now, some nitwits online insist that you absolutely cannot get seriously ill from homebrewing. I don't have a definitive answer to the question, but let's be serious here: you clearly COULD get seriously ill from homebrewing. I mean, you could adhere strictly to Rule #1 (never brew sober), get super drunk while brewing, dig around in the kitchen for some cheap gravity booster (aka table sugar), and accidentally toss two pounds of dish detergent into your boil instead of sugar. C'mon: it's white and powdery and smells nice, right?

I digress. The first time I ever helped with an all grain batch was in October 1999, with A & T, who taught me how to homebrew. Our first attempt at all grain in T's newly constructed system was a barleywine. (Why not go all the way?) While mashing, we racked the previous weekend's extract + specialty grain APA (american pale ale) to secondary, and drew off a healthy sample to measure gravity and taste. By healthy I mean that we actually drew off three samples: T had a very small amount in a small glass (maybe a couple ounces), A had about double that (perhaps a third of a pint glass), and I, being a glutton with poor judgment, had most of a full wheat beer glass of the beer. It was delicious: probably the third or fourth time T had brewed this excellent APA, and all indications were that this would be yet another excellent batch.

Important context: for sanitizing equipment, including the plastic racking tube and plastic hoses, we were using rubbing alcohol. And not the low grade 70% rubbing alcohol you normally use for standard household applications. No, if a little is good, then surely a lot is better, so we were using 99% rubbing alcohol, which is about as close to rocket fuel as you can buy at CVS. Turns out the cheap vinyl thinwall tubing is no match for this crazy shit, and the rubbing alcohol stuff tends to degrade the tubing. Which leads to barely visible cracks. Which harbor bacteria. You can see where this is going, no?

In any event, we go on brewing, making what would ultimately turn out to be an outstanding all grain barleywine, that I'd come to refer to as "Diarrhea Barleywine" or "Hospital Barleywine." See, T (consuming the smallest amount) ended up having a slightly upset stomach, A (consuming the medium amount) had a seriously upset stomach and really didn't feel good. I was a stupid pig, consumed the largest amount, and beginning around midnight that night, spent most of the night on the toilet. I'll spare you, kind reader, the really gory details, but let's say it was convenient that I was able to sit on the toilet, and simultaneously lean over and have my head over the bathtub. Oh, my poor housemates. I called the student health center in the morning and talked to my primary care physician, who upon learning that I'd had approximately thirty distinct batches of diarrhea, and vomited approximately twenty or thirty times and was now puking up clear bile, told me to not come anywhere near the student health center, but instead proceed directly to New England Baptist hospital, do not pass go.

This being my second year of law school, I was feeling awfully low on cash, and had a T pass, so of course I took the #39 bus to as close to the hospital as possible. Oh, my poor fellow passengers. I then walked up the hill from Huntington Avenue to New England Baptist, which is an average to steep hill, and under normal circumstances should take around three to five minutes to walk up. I think it took me about twenty minutes, as I had to stop several times to keep from collapsing, and vomit up bile in the gutter. I rolled in to the outpatient urgent care clinic, who took one look at me and sent me to a bed while they drew blood samples and took stool samples. In short order, my body chemistry tests came back totally out of whack, and they decided to admit me for severe dehydration.

I spent two nights and three days with constant IV rehydration running, on a floor with people who were actually genuinely ill. The nursing staff, understandably, was nice to me but didn't spend a whole lot of energy on me, and I had to buzz every time the IV fluid ran out, setting off an alarm on the IV unit that is only ear-splitting when you're within feet of it. By the second day I felt strong enough to get up and go to the bathroom myself without assistance, and by the end of the third day I actually made it down to the gift shop to buy myself a book. Sure, I had plenty of reading to do for my law school classes, but instead I read two Stephen King novels in an evening.

ANYWAY... here's some fun documentary evidence I came across while going through one of my boxes o' shit:

This is a copy of the room bill. It's a very, very good thing that Massachusetts law requires all full time students to have health insurance, and so (most? all?) schools provide it as part of your tuition and fees.


And here's a separate bill for three physician visits.



There's a potential variable, though: we ate at a somewhat sketchy Mexican restaurant in Saugus on Saturday evening. This is a copy of the receipt.


And finally, just for fun, here's the weird drawing on the back of that receipt. I can't explain it. I actually can't tell if I drew it, or T did. It looks like something I'd draw, but T is a way better artist than me, so if you think it's good, credit it to T.

The moral of the story? Homebrewing may or may not occasionally get you sick.

p.s. A note on image quality and privacy: just in case you're one of those people with nothing better to do than try to mine images and word documents online to undo edits, and see personal information, I wouldn't bother with these: except for the funny face, they're all scans of screen images.